Deterritory

I offer this glimpse of some of my intellectual history to the blog for extended and hopefully interested perusal.

I wish to thank my committee for its diligence in helping me to complete this project. I owe Dr. Paul Trembath a great deal for his numerous discussions with me on aesthetics, politics and poststructuralism, particularly his frequent accessibility outside of class. I am grateful to Dr. SueEllen Campbell for perhaps unwittingly reawakening my interest in Georges Bataille in a course on the literature of discovery and for her method of teaching theory through the painstaking (and time-consuming) interrogation of texts, a practical skill I hope I will never lose. Dr. Ron Williams' long-standing interest in Bataille, Deleuze, and aesthetics in general was of great help. Dr. Brad Macdonald served not only as a great friend but as a very helpful interlocutor in what was otherwise a rather taxing year. Additionally, I would like to thank Professors Marie-Laure Ryan, Donna LeCourt, and Fred Ensle for their useful insights into this project as well as provocative discussions on postmodernism and politics. I owe a particular gratitude to Dr. Phil Turetzky for his frequent interventions over the past thirteen years, for introducing me to philosophy, and for encouraging my interest in French thought. I have also benefited from numerous discussions with Kevin Foskin, Valerie Fulton, Lee Cooper, John Nawrocki, Beth Berila, Todd Schack, and Keith Foskin. I would also like to thank the theory reading group for providing useful forum for exploring some of these ideas.

HETEROLOGICAL AESTHETICS:
THE TRANSGRESSIVE CHOREOGRAPHY OF GEORGES BATAILLE


This essay is an attempt to read the writings of George Bataille with and against such contemporaries as Pierre Klosssowski and Maurice Blanchot and significant poststructuralists, such as Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault. The applicability of Bataille's thought to recent cultural and literary criticism is also examined.
Bataille is seen to deploy a notion of abjection that departs from that of Kristeva, who emphasizes a more Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of the term. Bataille's theory of abjection is rooted in sociological and ethnographic research and is connected with his larger theory of heterology. He can be seen to support a theory of aesthetics not reducible to the concept of art but, instead, one more congruent with Deleuze's theory of the senses.
Bataille's fictions, borrowing from Deleuze, are defended as masochistic but in a sense that departs from Deleuze. They belong to an "antihumanistic" framework that begins in the writings of Sade. Bataille is seen as an exemplary precursor to the work of Kathy Acker, who elaborates on some of Bataille's more difficult concepts in eroticism. Finally the notions of sovereignty and limit experience are examined in some detail.
William Leonard Ashline
Department of English
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
Fall 1995

For the sake of brevity and convenience, the frequently cited sources below have been abbreviated as follows.

CC--Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty
CS--Hollier, ed. The College of Sociology
E--Bataille, Erotism
HL--Acker, Hannibal Lector, My Father
IC--Blanchot, Infinite Conversation
LE--Bataille, Literature and Evil
MM--Bataille, My Mother
MMD--Acker, My Mother: Demonology
PT--Foucault, "Preface to Transgression"
SE--Bataille, Story of the Eye
SNB--Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond
TE--Bataille, Tears of Eros
TR--Bataille, Theory of Religion
VE--Bataille, Visions of Excess

One thinks a lot when afraid. And even more when one is afraid of being afraid. And even more when one is afraid of what one thinks. Afraid to think. Afraid of the thought--Denis Hollier

The human spirit is dominated by a demand that makes bliss intolerable--Georges Bataille

This essay has its origin in a photograph and an accompanying text, certain to puzzle the person reading or viewing it. The photograph is one of the most sickening imaginable--a torture and execution carried out in China in 1905 of a man found guilty of murdering a Mongolian prince. The man is tied to a set of poles forming the shape of a tripod. In the presence of a large crowd, thorougly mesmerized by the spectacle, the executioners carry out Leng-Tch'e, the mutilation of the assailant by cutting his body into one hundred pieces. The torture is prolonged through the administration of opium, which lends a seemingly ecstatic expression to the face of the victim. The text which accompanying the photograph is written by the French philosopher and novelist Georges Bataille, and it appears in his book The Tears of Eros. It is, in its initial viewing, quite chilling. Like the witnesses to the abhorrent event, he is obsessed by the image of a person whose rib cage is exposed and whose legs have become stumps as a result of the deft maneuvering of a knife. He writes,
This photograph had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic(?) and intolerable....Much later, in 1938, a friend initiated me into the practice of yoga. It was on this occasion that I discerned, in the violence of this image, an infinite capacity for reversal. Through this violence--even today I cannot imagine a more insane, more shocking form--I was so stunned that I reached the point of ecstasy. My purpose is to illustrate a fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism--and in particular sadism. From the most unspeakable to the most elevated (TE 206).
Under psychoanalytic terms, Bataille's phenomenological experience of the image of the event might be seen as the limit point where ineffable horror gives way to primal repression. But Bataille is far from satisfied with the causal linkage of horror and repression in the normative discourse of psychoanalysis. Virulent horror belongs to that same realm of experience as religious ecstasy, as the opposite side of the coin. In the context of a much larger text tracing the history of representations of the nexus of death and eroticism in the visual arts from the caves at Lascaux through surrealism, Bataille, who perhaps more than any other author in France exercised a broad influence on the intellectual development of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva, appears vulnerable to the accusation of aestheticizing torture. In the larger context of his oeuvre, however, such an indictment overlooks his larger concerns with eroticism and the general economy of expenditure. Bataille, like a number of thinkers who came after him, was a theorist of the "outside," of the "impossible." Using anthropology, history, literature, art, and the pariahs of literature and western philosophy, particularly Sade and Nietzsche, he launched a vigorous assault on the rationalist paradigm of western thought. As with many of his contemporaries writing in the modern episteme of "heterology," or the "discourse of the Other," Bataille attempted to theorize that which refuses understanding and assimilation into language--what he calls the "sacred." The multiple genres and styles he employs, including fiction, fragmentary aphorisms, and the sustained philosophical treatise, reflect the difficulty of this project.
This essay is an attempt to read Bataille within the context of contemporaries such as Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski, as well as prominent poststructuralists like Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva. Particular attention will be paid to his theory of aesthetics in as much as such a theory can be derived from his work. Although Bataille writes fiction, the notion of aesthetics explored in this project is not synonymous with the production of art works. Bataille's seemingly "pornographic" fiction will be examined within the larger context of his theory of eroticism, those sets of rituals and social practices that attend to the experience of sexuality but are not equivalent to it. Eroticism is not an exteriority, a "thing" fitting the purview of objective inquiry in the natural sciences. Like religion, eroticism is seen by the so-called "objective" stance as something "monstrous" (E 37). This attitude prevents a clear apprehension of the meaning of eroticism, which can only be apprehended through the "realm of inner experience," which eschews the pretense of rational distance found in the methods and procedures of natural science. Bataille can thus be said to be a precursor to the "personal narrative" of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. He can also be seen as responding in opposition to the "servile" science of man, what Michael Richardson has called "solidity," found in the work of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.
Terry Eagleton, in a recent study on the history of aesthetics, has termed the birth of aesthetics as a "discourse of the body." In its origin in the Greek aisthesis, "the whole region of human perception and sensation" is suggested as opposed to the "more rarified domain of conceptual thought" (Eagleton 13). The alignment of the notion of the aesthetic with that of art, with cultural works, reflects a particular problem faced in Germany during the eighteenth century, that of political absolutism (Eagleton 14). This period marked the emergence of the "professional literary caste," which, because it was attached to the feudal absolutist order and due to its "profound respect for authority," put sensuous consciousness to the service of reason. In its attempt to grasp the "grossly" sensual, reason relegated the notion of aesthetics to the field of art objects, which were evaluated and judged by the consciousness of reason. Aesthetics was thus no longer a possible confrontation with political authority, but in its merging with art became "symptomatic of an ideological dilemma inherent in absolutist power" (Eagleton 15). As we shall see, aesthetics became a discourse of profanation in the eighteenth century when it was appropriated by the discourse of reason away from the realm of the senses. Reason legislated the experience of aesthetics as sensation into the profane, with works of art, while art itself, was marked as sacred.
In recent French thought, from Bataille and Leiris through Deleuze and Foucault, a sense of sensuous consciousness, an originary notion of the aesthetic, has returned from its profanation by reason and restored into the space of the sacred. Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski, by returning to the work of the Marquis de Sade, have found a bitter fraternal precursor, but one who tried to comport his sensual radicalism to the dominant rationality of the enlightenment, a project doomed to fail. Less interested in justifications of perversion, Bataille and his contemporaries sought to locate perversion in the larger field of eroticism, as an expression of an unrestrained energy, one symptomatic of the economy of expenditure, that seemingly timeless need of human societies to expend the surplus energy remaining from the everyday experience of the profane world of work.
Recent academic criticism, taking as its points of departure the various poststructuralisms of Derrida, Foucault, and feminism in general, have embraced the broad task of rethinking the body against the predominance of subjectivity and of logocentrism in western thought. Discourses of desire, sensuality, gender, and the senses are circulating widely. Much of these owe an implicit inspiration to Bataille, as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who, following and yet departing from Edmund Husserl, attempted to locate consciousness in the body.
Bataille's primary means of overcoming the rationalist project of the enlightenment was in recuperating the darker side of existence from its profanation by rationalism. The most repulsive aspects of human existence exposed something altogether crucial about humanity. The experience of this dark, "malefic" aspect of the sacred restored a sense intimacy that had been effaced by the profane experience of the productive world. Contrary to the wishes of those arbiters of moral imperatives in the marketplace of religion, the agitation of the senses ushered by the experience of violence and sensuality cannot be legislated out of sight. More than anything, they reveal the "majority" as far from "moral." The great lesson of Bataille is that the fact of virulence in human societies can never lend any comfort, no matter what ideology or theology is dominant.
This essay will examine the malefic aspect of the sacred as it is manifested in the theoretical and fictional writings of Bataille. The first chapter on heterology and abjection will ground the second on Bataille's masochistic fictions. His writings will be seen as significantly related to those of Kristeva and Deleuze but also as strongly opposed to them. Deleuze, however, is far more "useful" for an understanding of Bataille than Kristeva, whose notion of abjection is more in line with a traditional notion of aesthetics in the evaluative register. For Deleuze, who, following Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, viewed the "senses" (rather than the theorists) to be the great "theoreticians," the masochistic experience of exacerbated and disavowed desire is the most explosive and productive means of theoretical understanding. It is here that a unanimity can be forged with Bataille. Ultimately, however, Deleuze's reading of masochism, though avoiding clinical appropriation, is too rigid. On this score, I resort to Carolyn Dean, whose metaphorical interpretation of masochism permits a closer relation to Bataille's fiction.
In the end, we arrive at a congruity between Nietzsche's overreacher and Bataille's sovereign being. Sovereignty, the condition of the impossible, can never be attained, though it can be glimpsed. Bataille's sovereign being is outside of culture, outside of ideological determination. But this being cannot be heard when she speaks. For her, the senses, rather than reason, disclose thoughts and possible modes of understanding. Rather than some culturally imbued rationality, which would separate the social construct of mind from the base materiality of the body, this entity recognizes clearly that thinking merges with the sensual experience of the body. Centuries of agitated sensual experience have made her deft at sorting out the grain from the stalk. She needs no well-developed argument about justice, since rational justification is always preceded by sensual understanding. This entity belongs to no time, to no culture, to no moral, political or aesthetic hierarchy imposed by culture. She is the "impossible" and is nowhere to be found. Yet this sovereign being can be described. In a milieu lacking workable prescriptions, this is perhaps the best we can do.

While they always relate to corporeal orifices as to so many landmarks parceling-constituting the body's territory, polluting objects fall, schematically, into two types: excremental and menstrual. Neither tears nor sperm, for instance, although they belong to borders of the body, have any polluting value--Julia Kristeva

The act of exclusion has the same meaning as social or divine sovereignty, but it is not located on the same level; it is precisely located in the domain of things and not, like sovereignty, in the domain of persons. It differs from the latter in the same way that anal eroticism differs from sadism--Georges Bataille


In the late 1930s, Georges Bataille formed two separate but interrelated groups comprised of mostly the same members: Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiris. The first, the Acéphale was an experiment in the formation of secret societies of the sort that the second, College of Sociology, set about to examine. The former was short-lived owing to disagreements with Bataille's desire to carry out a ritual human sacrifice of an unwitting victim taken from outside the group. Other contentions, as well as the outbreak of the war, prompted the disbanding of the

group. On the other hand, the College of Sociology met biweekly for nearly two years, beginning in November 1937.
A. ON ABJECTION
Bataille presented two very important papers on "Attraction and Repulsion" during meetings in January and February of 1938, which elucidate a concept of abjection explored and elaborated almost forty years later by Julia Kristeva, though, as we shall see, in a somewhat different manner. Bataille, however, does not employ the term in this particular examination, though it is quite clear from the texts that the concept is implied. The abject eludes theorization and should not be properly thought of as a concept but as a spectrum of bodily sensations ranging from revulsion to horror. According to Denis Hollier, none of Bataille's writings on abjection were ever finished. Instead, they were, notably, "textual failures" published posthumously ("The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the Informe and the Abject" 4). Necessarily, these failed texts were a "defeatist discourse," for the abject can never be enunciated but only suggested (a limitation one finds in Kristeva as well) ("The Politics..." 20).
For Bataille more than Kristeva, the abject is of primary importance in the structure of social organization and cohesion. It is less a psychological reaction to particular objective conditions than a fundamental sociological principle. He states that
what constitutes the individual nucleus of every conglomerate of human society is displayed in the most primitive conditions as a reality neither personal nor local--and whose nature has obviously been profoundly changed by social existence. What we are talking about is a set of objects, places, beliefs, persons, and practices that have a sacred character, all of which--objects, places, beliefs, persons, and practices--belong exclusively to one group and not another (CS 106).
This social nucleus is more complex than the individuals who comprise the social organization; neither is it reducible to the aggregate of individuals forming the social structure. Bataille argues that the social nucleus includes more than just persons. It is the "object of a fundamental repulsion" and therefore taboo--"untouchable and unspeakable" (CS 106). He continues that the social nucleus
partakes of the nature of corpses, menstrual blood, or pariahs. Other sorts of filth, in comparison with such a reality, represent only a dissipated force of repulsion: They are not completely untouchable, they are not completely unnameable. Everything leads us to believe that early human beings were brought together by disgust and by common terror, by an insurmountable horror focused precisely on what originally was the central attraction of their union (CS 106).
A sense of revulsion thus underlies social agglomeration. But this "sense" is "completely untouchable and unnameable." The same sense that would call for the eradication of abject objects as taboo, as in the case of the repulsive body, is at the source of the unity of communities. This sense is not reducible to violence, death, or the body in all its base materiality, but is instead equivalent to the loathing attendant to their exclusion from the social order. Base materiality repels because it reminds one of the appropriation of the living animal as a thing. Since the body so often is treated as "strictly subordinate" to what it does, that is, as utility, the corpse reveals its "thinghood" in "impotence"--as complete uselessness (TR 40). This sense of revulsion belongs to the experience of the sacred, according to Bataille. As we shall see, the sacred is comprised of two aspects.
By the sacred, Bataille means more than religion, though the sacred is inclusive of it. However, the sacred is also much less than the totality of the social realm, which is also comprised of the "postsacred" or the "profane" world--our contemporary milieu with respect to human social organization, where aspects of the sacred return only briefly and intermittently.
Bataille uses the term "presacred" to describe the condition of animal societies, which are marked by the principle of "interattraction," a "troposensitivity directing individuals of certain species toward each other" (CS 105). Occasionally, animal societies also display characteristics of "interrepulsion," but this last principle is far more prominent in human societies, in fact, as the significant differentiating one for Bataille. Human societies, however, are not devoid of the principle of interattraction, though it is apparent in only two existing forms according to Bataille: sexual interattraction, the most "immediate" and the most significantly in common with animal societies (in night club parlance, we might call this "body chemistry"), and laughter. Typically, human interattraction is "mediated" rather than immediate, sacred rather than "presacred." By this, Bataille means that interattraction is never "pure" but instead filtered through various social norms and taboos as well as psychological states, emotions, etc. He is not explicit about these possible explanations, but they might be readily inferred from the examples he provides.
Immediate laughter is exemplified in that of an infant child responding to the laughter of an adult. Mediated laughter partakes of the doublet of attraction and repulsion in the particularly outstanding cases Bataille describes. Mediated laughter, as well as mediated sexual excitement, is abject. It is the limit point where the difference between attraction and repulsion breaks down--each circulating into the other. In an instance of mediated laughter, a young girl considered otherwise quite charming laughs uncontrollably when she hears of the death of anyone she knows. She transgresses the taboo of reverence for the dead, but the violation seems unwilling; the mediator thus appears to be some psychological condition. As an example of mediated sexual excitement, Bataille cites the case of a young man who suffers from an erection when he attends funerals. The state of abjection becomes quite extreme when he suffers this condition at his father's ceremony, a strong sense of guilt forcing him to leave the event. Both laughter and sexual excitement retain aspects of immediacy but are primarily mediated by a sense of despondency and distress in the case of laughter and a mutual repugnance of the genitalia in sexual experience. One might infer additional sites of repulsion; however, the main point is that these particular cases of mediated experience are abject in that they admit of a circular movement between attraction and repulsion.
B. SACRED SOCIOLOGY
Whereas the first part of Bataille's examination of attraction and repulsion was concerned with laughter, tears, and sexuality, the second part examines the organization of social structures, as well as the structure and impetus of his own thought and its justification. He insists that his theory of society is not a delusional "combat ideology," which might ally it with a Hegelian vocabulary of dialectical reversal or synthesis. He contends that his investigations are rooted in ethnographic research, but he is not willing to suspend his subjective stance in order to maintain the illusion of objective distance in relation to his analysis.
In this recognition of the subjective stance of the human "scientist," Bataille in the late 1930s is anticipating the insights of the hermeneutic approach to the social sciences that Charles Taylor will maintain over four decades later. Bataille asserts that the perception of social phenomena is not possible without a simultaneous inquiry by the researcher into her own experience. On this point, Bataille borrows a term that has its origin in the hermeneutic tradition, particularly in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, who calls it Erlebnis: "...I would have perceived nothing if my thought had not, at the beginning, followed a process that is entirely foreign to that of a biologist's thinking, namely the analysis of lived experience" (CS 120, emphasis added). It is interesting to note that Bataille recognizes lived experience as not pure, not capable of being isolated or bracketed phenomenologically from the impact of the intellectual forces that color such experience. In this sense, he acknowledges that lived experience is "fabricated" or constructed--in his case, affected by the developments in psychoanalysis and French sociology, particularly Durkheim and Mauss. But, he states, "such tampering and fabrication were necessary to become conscious of the essentially repugnant character of sacred things" (CS 120). His argument echoes that of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who articulated the notion that "prejudice" informs and enables human understanding. It cannot be suspended or purged from the mind apropos the phenomenological method but instead stands as a condition for the possibility of thought.
For Bataille, the exemplary cases of the "central nucleus of an agglomeration"--where what he calls the "left sacred," or the dark, impure, malefic, repulsive aspect of the sacred, is transformed into the "right sacred," the beneficent or white sacred, sometimes called pure attraction--can be found in religious practices, particularly rituals of death (CS 122). The elevation of the victim prior to his execution in the ceremony of human sacrifice serves as one instance. This is particularly clear in the practice of the Aztecs, where the victim acquires the signification of a god. The funeral ceremony provides another example. The participants venerate the corpse yet maintain a "respectful distance since the crowd, despite having been drawn there, does not cease to be subjected to the great force of repulsion belonging to lifeless bodies" (CS 118). The same can be said as well of the Christian feast days with respect to the "guilty anguish," the fundamental repulsion, attending to the icon of a "tortured body, stamped with vile abuse," who is yet elevated to sublime divinity (CS 122). The central nucleus is thus structured on abjection, according to this account. What unites humans into communities is not a calculus of rational interests, nor so much the forces of ethnic homogeneity, but instead a vile repugnance. The sacred inspires a sense of "impotent horror," a sense of ambiguity at its "incomparable value," as well as its vertiginous danger to the profane world of production (TR 36). This ambiguity reflects the sacred as divided: "the dark and malefic sacred is opposed to the white and beneficent sacred and the deities that partake of the one or the other are neither rational nor moral" (TR 72). Accordingly, Bataille writes that human communities "are bound and sworn to that which horrifies us most, that which provokes our most intense disgust" (CS 114).
Yet, at the same time, that which repels also inspires "intense devotion" (CS 124). The production of objects of abjection, the repulsive things comprising the left aspect of the sacred, are those entities which threaten the existence of the community and must be further regulated by prohibition and taboo. According to Bataille, the single most important feature of human communities is the need to expend surplus energy, his notion of dépense or expenditure. This constitutes a reversal, leading to a privileging of the sacred over the profane world of work, of the paradigm of production found in Hegel and subsequently Marx. Bataille describes the sacred as "that prodigious effervescence of life, that for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence" (TR 52). Work is profane because it turns humans into tools, into "things" whose sole purpose is that of producing. The continuity between persons, the sense of the sacred, has been elided by the predominance of the "discontinuous object," the "profane tool," humanity in its utilitarian attribute (TR 35). In the dualist interpretation, the "divine becomes rational and moral and relates the malefic sacred to the sphere of the profane (TR 72). But what is actually profane in Bataille's account is not the malefic sacred, nor the beneficent sacred, but the world of discontinuity or "thinghood."
The necessity of radical expenditure in human agglomerations leads to its opposite--the restraint of expenditure in the form of prohibition. However, this interdiction "that prohibits crime, that prohibits the very principle of expenditure, that maintains the integrity of the social whole and in the last analysis denies its criminal origin," "in no way deprives the crime of the energetic value that is necessary to bring the overall social movement and prohibitive power itself into play" (CS 123).
C. HETEROLOGY AND AESTHETICS
We should be able to say accurately at this point that the abject, lending itself only to suggestion and adumbration, is incapable of being theorized because of its legislation into the realms of prohibition and repression, eventually resurfacing in the social and individual forms delineated by Bataille. We can see as well that much more is at stake than an "aestheticization of torture" in Bataille's observation of the photograph depicting the spectacular torture in China in 1905. Denis Hollier makes this quite clear in his explanation of Bataille's concept of heterology. This concept can be readily exchanged with such terms as scatology or "base materialism." Abject matter, the subject of heterological analysis, is "defined less by its internal properties than by an absolute impropriety, its resistance to any appropriation or assimilation--even intellectual" (Hollier, "Forward: Collage" xix). Hollier also reiterates Bataille's point that the theory of attraction and repulsion does not serve as a combat ideology. It is neither a political nor an aesthetic strategy, though it did eventually acquire political magnitude. He states,
Heterology is not a technique for provoking scandal. Bataille had very little to do with the surrealist provocations, those rituals of cultural aggression that were intended to test the limits of avant-garde tolerance. Heterology is not a product of the aestheticization of the repugnant. Disgust here is not a modality of aesthetic experience but a fundamental existential dimension. Reactions of repulsion do not have to be induced: They are what is given to start with. But rather than discharging them outside (rather than getting rid of them), one should think them. Heterology would be the theory of that which theory expels. In its battle with the angel of repugnance, in the depths of darkness, thought persistently faces the things that repel it (Hollier, "Forward..." xix, emphasis mine).
Aesthetics here can be understood as the "body" in a state of abjection rather than simply a series of modalities for approaching and judging objects of art. To "aestheticize the repugnant" is to provide a "combat ideology," a dialectical reversal of an aesthetics of the beautiful. Aesthetic experience would then constitute a continuum running from sublime repugnance to sublime beauty. The task of a "critique of aesthetic experience" would then amount to little more than the utterance of banalities about the marginalization of the sense of disgust and that which has traditionally "merited" this sense in bourgeois aesthetic history. This is very much the condition of contemporary cultural and literary criticism, which has been intent on reversing the inequities of ethnic and gender marginalization. The effect of much of this criticism has been the reproduction of aesthetic categories in the context of the reversal.
The term "heterology" is taken from Bataille's theory of the "heterogeneous" or foreign body and receives its most extended treatment in his essay "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade," where he spends literally no effort in analyzing Sade's work, mentioning him only in the context of his admirers, primarily Breton and the surrealists, whom he detests. The "heterogeneous" is the foreign body, an identification that aligns base materiality with the sacred (the malefic aspect). He opposes this term to that of "homogeneity," which is primarily appropriative and establishes a relationship of identity between an object and its possessor. Science, religion, poetry, and philosophy are the great "appropriative" disciplines for Bataille. Science is aligned with common sense, which philosophy opposes. But philosophy has the misfortune of being only able to conceive of the "waste products of intellectual appropriation" as but "abstract forms of totality" (VE 96). Religion is indicted for betraying "the needs that it was not only supposed to regulate, but satisfy" (VE 97). Poetry reproduces "any one of a number of aesthetic homogeneities," and thus runs into the same problem that confronts that of art: in the hierarchy of superior value it creates for itself, it produces ever more waste products that acquire "an ever stronger excremental value" (VE 97). Heterology is thus linked to the overturning of an established order (VE 100). He writes,
Without a profound complicity with natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood, sudden catastrophes and the horrible cries of pain that accompany them, terrifying ruptures of what had seemed to be immutable, the fall into stinking filth of what had been elevated--without a sadistic understanding of an incontestably thundering and torrential nature, there could be no
revolutionaries, there could only be a revolting utopian sentimentality (VE 101).
Sade's value thus lies in this propensity to revolutionary excitation, not as an exemplary avant-garde artist. This fact has prompted Jean-Michel Heimonet to write that "the only way to be faithful to Sade is to take him from the page to the street, to make of him not the object of a hypocritical contemplation...but the catalyst of a spontaneous social revolution" (Heimonet 228-29).
At this point, the explanation of the abject's resistance to theory should become quite clear. Heterology is not interchangeable with abjection but might instead be seen as an attempt to theorize the latter. The photograph that Bataille views leads to the implosion of any residual rationalizing tendencies. The trace of the image of the ineffable sacred nucleus is imprinted on his psyche, a distant memory sliding into his slight consciousness from the virulent disruption of his body. Bataille might say that the photograph incites him into a certain kind of awareness, an inner experience of the sacred. The act of horror awakens the viewer of the act to a sense of continuity, not only with the victim but also the executioners. No participant eludes the sense of guilt. The fact of torture is beyond the question of justice, a question of no interest to Bataille in this context, in part because the answer is all too obvious. The significant questions that emerge in Bataille's viewing involve experience and sensation.
One more point should be noted on the question of the aestheticization of torture, and it is developed by Hollier. The three texts supporting the inauguration of the College of Sociology, by Caillois, Leiris, and Bataille, have among their commonalities the denunciation of art and literature. In a letter to Alexandre Kojève, Bataille rejected art explicitly: "the man of unemployed, purposeless negativity was unable to find `in the work of art an answer to the question that he himself is'" (Quoted in Hollier, "Forward..." xxv). And in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," Bataille is even less equivocal:
...those who serve art have renounced making what an uneasy destiny has compelled them to bring to light into a true world....Those who serve art can accept for those whom they create a shadowy and fugitive existence; nonetheless, they themselves are obliged to enter as living beings into the real world of money, fame, and social position. It is impossible, therefore, for them to have a life that is not lame (CS 15).
Art, that seeming domain of the sacred in modernity, is unable to escape the strictures of the profane world. The circulation of art through the body is reactive rather than active, overdetermined in its associative significations. Hollier has noted elsewhere that the exhibit of "Abject Art"--a clear oxymoron in the context of this account--in New York at the Whitney museum during the summer of 1993--an ostensible effort to express the sense of repulsion that so obsessed Bataille--failed as such because the works on display clearly belonged in the category of "art," their neat and orderly presentation conforming to anything but the realm of the abject. Hollier states that these works "belonged on the side of the victor. This is very different from the young Bataille's dark utopianism and his obsession with the abjection of the defeated, with the fact that the abject, resisting metaphoricization and displacement, can never be put on display" ("Politics..." 20). Similarly, the aims of the College of Sociology were far more radical than those of the avant-garde and modernism, who saw art as the

means to escape the social and political accommodations attached to the cultural recognition of art. For the College, in order to escape such accommodation, one had to renounce art works completely. According to Hollier, the worst insult one could render to a thinker like Bataille would be to call him a "writer," an indignity he would eventually have to endure (Hollier, "Forward..." xxv).
D. BATAILLE VERSUS KRISTEVA ON ABJECTION
Bataille's "defeatist" discourse of abjection, where human societies are united by their members' aversion to (rather than their captivation by) one another, cannot be registered on the tier of "Abject Art" housed comfortably in the Whitney. Bataille's interest in art in Tears of Eros is not merely aesthetic but primarily ethnographic. Hollier has noted that the contemporary interest in the abject is a reflection of "a strange institutionalization of the beyond of the pleasure principle" where a "fascination with the abject is involved" ("Politics..." 21). Consequently, in order to avoid aligning Bataille's project with that of "the strong academic voice" of Kristeva or with fashionable accommodations to capital, like the museum exhibition, theorists like Hollier and Rosalind Krauss have preferred Bataille's notion of the informe to that of the abject. Allan Stoekl has translated this term as "formless," and it makes its first appearance in a very brief text that Bataille contributed to the dictionary in the journal, Documents, in 1929. The informe is a term that he sees as important not for its designated meaning but for its operation in language. If the task of philosophy, for academia in general, is to make order out of chaos, the informe demonstrates the exigency of recognizing the latter's refusal of appropriative generalization. The informe designates the object that refuses the form of art, of cultural appropriation as commodity. He writes:
What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm....(F)or 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 informe amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit (VE 31).
The informe is abject because it is refused by the profane, rational sense of order exemplified by western philosophy. The informe is clearly not on the side of the victor, that is to say, on the side of rationality, as Hollier noted. Krauss demonstrates that the task of the term in Bataille's usage is to "undo the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter" (Krauss, The Originality...53). But this does not mean that the informe is merely the other side of form, as if in a binary opposition. Nor is form merely the ordering converse of chaos, for chaos always has the capacity to be formed. The informe, as Krauss puts it cryptically, is what "form itself creates, as logic acting logically to act against itself within itself, form producing a heterologic...not as the opposite of form but as a possibility working at the heart of form, to erode it from within" (Krauss, The Optical...167). The informe is that which the frock coat cannot entirely conceal but what is essential to the form sheltered within. The informe is the waste matter considered extraneous and unuseful that theory would otherwise expel. One might compare it to Jacques Derrida's notion of "differànce" or find it analogous to Gilles Deleuze's theory of "differential sense." The heterological is by its very nature differential. The need to think of the informe as the opposite of form is itself rooted in a certain "form" of philosophical thinking, that of binary oppositions at the exclusion of alternative, intermittent values.
The informe is base matter which exists outside the subject and the "idea" of base materiality, but at the same time it cannot become a substitute superior principle, which would ally it again with idealism and the dominance of "servile reason." As Bataille argues, "base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations" (VE 51). The "metaphysical scaffolding" distinguishing matter from form is no more interesting than the "different styles of architecture" (VE 45).
The informe in Bataille turns out to be fairly equivalent to the heterological and must be seen as distinct from Julia Kristeva's attempt to give form to abjection in The Powers of Horror. Whereas Kristeva's account of abjection is primarily psychoanalytic and aesthetic in the traditional sense of an alliance with the concept of art, Bataille's notions of heterology and the informe refuse art in favor of a concept of aesthetics that emphasizes the intensification of bodies and senses. Bataille's notions are derived in part from the ethnographic research of Mauss, Durkheim, and others, from his sociological investigations with Caillois, Leiris, and Klossowski, and from the theoretical assault beginning to build in France during the postwar period against rationalism and in support of an empiricism of the senses. In Bataille's account, as we have seen, abjection could be said to be that pivotal moment when the opposition in the sacred between attraction and repulsion breaks down with each turning into the other, as in the instances of eroticism and laughter he describes. But this collapse of difference also becomes apparent in the ritual activities of communities, particularly those concerned with death. For Bataille, the psychological aspects or origins of abjection in the experience of the individual are seen in the larger context of societal matrices. The psychological is thus part of the sociological, whose net is cast wider.
In Kristeva's account, on the other hand, the abject, while also viewed as untheorizable, is only capable of being glimpsed through literature, where it leaves its trace as the opposite pole of jouissance. Just as literature revealed the feminine space of the semiotic in The Revolution of Poetic Language, so too does literature open the space of abjection. Because the abject is seen in this binary relation to jouissance, her view of the concept might be said to belong to the realm of the profane rather than the sacred space examined by Bataille, a thinker far more interested in overcoming the distinction between jouissance and abjection rather than its retention. Kristeva's version of horror might thus be seen as perhaps a bit overly cosmetic.
Literature has always occupied a privileged position for Kristeva, dating from her doctoral work on poetic language in the sixties. She has typically aligned herself with a particular lineage of modernism and the avant-garde that Bataille, as we have seen, would have avoided. But while literature for Kristeva is the arena where one finds the fullest expression of the abject, this articulation is not exclusively confined there. For "all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse...rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border...where identities...do not exist or only barely so--double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject" (Kristeva 207).
Concurring with Kristeva, M. Keith Booker has noted that abjection in literature has a "powerful transgressive potential" (136). Abject images serve to undermine the appropriation of voices, particularly marginal ones, by the canonizing forces of institutionalization. The evocation of strong emotional responses is seen to accomplish this task (Booker 148). Nevertheless, contrary to the wishful utopianism of Kristeva and Tel Quel--the organization with which she was affiliated during the 1960s--regarding the transformative potential of literature, literary transgressions are far from politically coextensive.
Kristeva's intellectual commitments are to linguistics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, especially Lacan, and these differentiate her approach to abjection from that of Bataille. In her analysis of the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for example, she locates the abject primarily in the primal Oedipal scene: first of all, in the form of the repulsive, yet fascinating "masochistic mother who never stops working" (Kristeva 158), as well as in the horrible birth scene, the vertex of the doublet of attraction and repulsion, "the height of bloodshed and life...horror and beauty" (Kristeva 155). Not surprisingly, given her focus and orientation, she has the occasion to write, first of all, that "the mother takes up her place, so it goes once again, at the central location of the writer's feminine showroom" (Kristeva 157); secondly, the bankrupt, "technocratic" father deserving to be murdered and embodying the "castration of modern man..., (is the) universal dummy and the ultimate token of a world lacking in jouissance and able to find being only in abjection" (Kristeva 173). The primal scene is thus the primary source of abjection binding human societies and is, in this account, marked by a nostalgia for jouissance, a condition elided by the dominance of the symbolic order or "Law of the Father."
Like Bataille, however, Kristeva sees the abject as "the sign of an impossible ob-ject," whose adumbration is apparent only after the transgression of the limit (Kristeva 154). But for her, abjection resides more prominently in Thanatos, or the death drive, rather than in Bataille's sacred, which compels the unity of communities. Both theorists, though, see the abject as salient in the fascination with the corpse. Kristeva cites a passage from Death on the Installment Plan to underscore this point, a graphic depiction of Father Fleury dismembering a corpse.
He sticks his finger into the wound...He plunges both hands into the meat...he digs into all the holes...He tears away the soft edges...He pokes around...Some kind of pouch bursts...The juice pours out...it gushes all over the place...all full of brains and blood...splashing...(560).
It is not surprising, given her interest in this passage on the corpse and given her feminism, that Kristeva would become concerned with Céline's history as a medical practitioner, particularly his doctoral work on Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who practiced in Vienna and discovered the cause of puerperal fever, a disease afflicting women during childbirth. He advocated that doctors wash their hands after having contact with corpses so as not to contaminate the women they were attending during childbirth. As Kristeva notes, Semmelweis "had what it takes to fascinate those (like Céline) suffering from obsessions but, more deeply, those who fear decay and death at the touch of the feminine" (Kristeva 159). It is more likely the case that Céline should have been threatened by the "touch of the masculine" doctor, who unwittingly contaminates, rather than the feminine. Céline's obsessions seem thus to be misplaced.
Like Bataille's liminal point of circulation, where attraction becomes repulsion and vice versa, Kristeva's abject is "edged with the sublime," a sublime having no object (Kristeva 11). "Sublimation" is the process of naming the "prenominal," of keeping it under control. The sublime is a "something added," creating the possibility of the experience of the sacred. The sublime belongs to the sacred of which the abject constitutes an element of the malefic side. The sublime is present in both the malefic and beneficent aspects. However, the ecstatic face of the torture victim examined by Bataille would be beyond abjection and horror in Kristeva's view (Kristeva 59). For her, the abject is sublime, but the sublime moment of ecstacy in the face of horror is not, however, abject, as it is in Bataille. For Kristeva, the confrontation with the ecstatic "appears, where our civilization is concerned, only
in a few rare flashes of writing" (Kristeva 59). The ecstatic in her view, goes "beyond abjection and fright" (59).
The evocation of images or adumbrations of the abject are very much equivalent in Bataille and Kristeva; however, the impetus for their investigations arises from separate sets of questions. While acknowleging the significance of religious practices, Kristeva nonetheless grounds the abject psychoanalytically. Bataille is compelled by a more sociological analysis. Kristeva credits Bataille with having linked the "production of the abject" with the weakness of prohibition, with the archaic relationship of the subject to the object. She cites a passage from Bataille on this issue:
Abjection [...] is merely the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding abject things (and that act establishes the foundations of collective existence) (quoted in Kristeva 56).
Abjection, in this account, is no longer merely the prohibition of the abject, of the vile object, but instead the inability to prohibit whatsoever--a condition which might also be described as the inability of or an incapacity for a necessary affirmation. She associates abjection with the "production of the abject," but it is not clear from Bataille's account whether abjection as the "failure to prohibit" sufficiently recognizes abject things. This passage seems to serve as a justification of Hollier's argument that abjection for Bataille cannot ally itself with the victor, with the power to exclude, such exclusion being the source of the formation of communities. Thus, to associate abjection with the "production of the abject," with the ability to determine abject things, is largely a misunderstanding of Bataille. Moreover, if it is the case, in Bataille's account, that abjection fails to recognize objects as abject in order to exclude them, this deficiency might be an effect of Bataille's sublime moment where the cleavage separating attraction from repulsion evaporates, where the abject as the producer of culture remains to be affirmed. Kristeva, herself, hints at such a possibility in her analysis of India. Hindu castes are noted for their strong adherence to rituals of "defilement," while at the same time being blind to "filth," e.g. public defecation. The vile excrement lying in plain view goes largely unnoticed (Kristeva 74). However, it should be relatively apparent that indifference rather than attraction marks this particular example.
Bataille's notion of abjection is not definitive, as Hollier noted. However, Kristeva's account and appropriation of it does little to illuminate Bataille's meaning. The collapse of the differential aspect of attraction and repulsion is a recurrent motif in Bataille's fiction and theoretical work, for example, in his coupling of sexual ecstacy with frenetic rituals of death. More examples will be examined in the second chapter on Bataille's fiction. This aspect of attraction and repulsion goes largely ignored by Kristeva, who privileges the literary domain of cultural capital as sacred, rendering the corpse as anaesthetized and preserved rather than decayed. Krauss, on the other hand, underwrites the visual arts with her brand of Bataille as informe, and, while rejecting "abject art," she maintains art as sacred more generally. Thus, the impact of Bataille's thought has not been fully met. The moment of differential collapse is manifested in Céline's sinister laughter, a number of Sade's perversions, Sacher-Masoch's erotic self-banishment, and in some of the salient features of Kristeva's theory. The break down of difference is equivalent to the limit exceeded by the transgressive abject, and this crucial moment is the primary focus of my examination of the question of abjection. As we shall see in the next section, this notion of transgression is not the same as the authorized excesses of the carnival or the extravagant feast--the sanctioned blowout reaffirming the establishment of the Law.
Another important difference between Kristeva and Bataille can be found in her articulation of the subject/object relationship, which she interprets as the "relationship to the mother," indicating her Lacanian leanings. Krauss indicates that while Bataille attacks the imposition of categories in his notion of the informe, Kristeva's work involves the "recuperation of certain objects as abject." ("Politics..." 3). Bataille is far less interested in objects than in the experience of abjection. The informe, according to Krauss, does not suggest a hierarchical reversal privileging the base material. Instead, the term connotes a process or task. On the other hand, she claims such a reversal can be found clearly in Kristeva's work, "because her whole effort seems to be about returning to the referent" ("The Politics..." 4). By this notion of the "referent," she suggests the recuperation of objects as abject mentioned previously.
While the abject is said to be no "definable object" in Kristeva's account, she, nonetheless, proceeds to define objects as such. But on this score, not much separates her theory from Bataille, who might also be said to define certain objects this way, particularly the corpse. The crucial divergence between the two lies in the relative significance given to objects as abject in their respective overall theories. For Bataille, objects are nothing more than a part of the larger nexus of attraction and repulsion operating in human societies. They operate as signifers, as epiphenomena of abjection as formless production. Kristeva's view emphasizes the Oedipal scene and surveys various objects as abject. Among these objects, is the skin-like rim forming at the top of a cup of warm milk. But in including such objects, Kristeva diminishes the power of her theory by overextending it. She moves beyond the question of the taboo into the triviality of personal sensibilities. Her notion of the abject focuses primarily upon horror and repulsion, objects of inducement, in what is called the left aspect of the "sacred" in Bataille. She is less interested in that pivotal limit where the experiences of attraction and repulsion circulate.
Michael Andre Bernstein has raised comparable criticisms of Kristeva's account of abjection for having abandoned, "by overextension, the explanatory force of the term" (29). Kristeva couples the sinister, immoral personalities of Céline's narrators with vile, repugnant objects. In this sense, Bernstein is right. Her survey is too broad. But he forgets her claim that the abject eludes theorization and can only be suggested in its multifarious forms. Thus, he overemphasizes the abject as categorical rather than formless in his critique. And yet Kristeva's account has the clear weakness of being overly formalistic and her language too suggestive, so that she does not delineate clear distinctions between a Céline and the surface of yesterday's hot chocolate.
Yve-Alain Bois, responding to the comment by Krauss on referentiality, notes that though Bataille downplays the significance of objects, he is not anti-referential: the referent is given a transgressive function in his work; whereas in Kristeva, abjection is the referent "given as an origin" ("The Politics..." 19-21). On this point, one might say that Bois highlights Kristeva's claim that the archaic object is maternal.
Denis Hollier's clear demarcation between the work of Bataille and Kristeva has substantial merit. In fact, the only apparent congruity between them can be found in their respective concerns with horror and repulsion. But while the notion of abjection is pertinent to Bataille's work, it is not simply reducible to his theory of heterology, which describes a field of inquiry that is both informe and abject. But this interpretation of the abject is not equivalent to Kristeva's. Contemporary cultural criticism, influenced profoundly by Kristeva and her formalist precursors, have often failed to take note of these distinctions. Most, in fact, have largely ignored the impact of Bataille. This can be observed quite clearly in recent work on the literature of transgression and its appropriation of the notion of abjection.
E. ABJECTION AS TRANSGRESSION
Much of recent literary and cultural scholarship, influenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, on the transgressive in literature and social practices has zeroed in on the connection between abjection and the carnivalesque. The abject is situated in the "material bodily lower stratum," as well as the grotesque spectacle of freaks in masks exemplified in the festive forms of the carnival. As a temporarily sanctioned bacchanalian inversion of cultural mores, a revolution of the chaotic over the ordered universe, and a celebration of human desire for the creative reconstruction of a personal and social identity excluding class divisions and the claims of status, the carnival operates as an ostensibly necessary "dialogic" practice fusing elite, high culture with the imperatives of low, populist convention. For Bakhtin, the human potential for carnival is explosive in a raw usurpation of social and political norms and rules. Following Bakhtin, Krystyna Pomorska writes that the
carnival is opposed to official culture. The `authoritarian word' does not allow any other type of speech to approach and interfere with it. Devoid of any zones of cooperation with other types of words, the `authoritarian word' thus excludes dialogue. Similarly, any official culture that considers itself the only respectable model dismisses all other cultural strata as invalid or harmful (In Bakhtin x).
Similarly, Michael Holquist has written that "Bakhtin's carnival...is not only not an impediment to revolutionary change, it is revolution itself" (In Bakhtin xviii). Yet, one has to question the extent to which the carnival is revolutionary and the manner in which it accomplishes this aspiration. Certainly an undeniable social power is inherent in the carnival, though, as Booker has noted, no actual transformation of social norms occurs when the Law licenses and sanctions its own metaphorical overthrow. The Law and the liberation from the Law are thus complicitous rather than antagonistic (Booker 7). Similarly, contrary to the hopes of a modernist like Kristeva, literary transgressions, be they reiterations of the carnivalesque or not, are not clearly politically coextensive, even if they manage to transform prior modes of thinking (Booker 3). The weight placed upon the seeming transformative power of popular festive forms by Bakhtin is itself historically and culturally situated as a possible response to repression in the former Soviet Union. His utopian libertarianism has been largely dampened by a more stringent political realism, one that would similarly temper any current optimism about recent political events in the former Soviet bloc stemming from the imposition of a "dialogic" glastnost. The formless abject always eludes any dialogical inclusion, since, by its very nature, it is outside of discourse. The "dialogic" always assumes an "other" capable of speaking and being heard. Glastnost could only serve as not much more than an improvement in social engineering.
Umberto Eco has registered a similar skepticism toward the so-called transgressive aspects of the carnival, arguing that it can only be revolutionary when it is completely unexpected or violating rules in a manner wholly unanticipated. Thus, the carnival might be seen as a mere formalization of the abject. Moreover, since the modern mass media has institutionalized the carnival on a grand scale as spectacle, little optimism can be generated from reinstituting that which is already well-entrenched. Because life is carnivalized continuously, the notion of carnival itself becomes vapid. Nothing can be carnivalized if everything already is. Thus Eco writes that "in a world of everlasting transgression, nothing remains comic or carnivalesque, nothing can any longer become an object of parody, if not transgression itself" (Eco 7). Bataille has registered similar reservations about any "subversive" aspirations inherent in the practice of the carnival. He writes,
(t)hus the letting loose of the festival is finally, if not fettered, then at least confined to the limits of a reality of which it is the negation. The festival is tolerated to the extent that it reserves the necessities of the profane world (TR 54).
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have concurred with Eco that transgression and the carnivalesque are not necessarily politically coextensive, as opposed to the more optimistic views of Kristeva and Bakhtin. And yet while recognizing that the permitted disorder of the carnival serves to reestablish the existing order as a "ruse of power," they nevertheless maintain, following Bakhtin, that the carnival has become more than a ritual but also a "cultural analytic," a "mode of understanding" (Stallybrass and White 6). Primarily, they focus on certain carnivalesque motifs, including the fair, the grotesque body and its functions, and abject animals, like rats and hogs, in order to demonstrate that these "contained outsiders" are always socially constructed by the dominant culture rather than simply pre-given (23). The symbolic inversion of the low over the high in the ritual practice of the fair gradually declined, though, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (32). The grotesque body constituted a subversion of the idealism of the classical body, which was seen as distant and aesthetic rather than as social (22). Theorists of the New Historicist bent, such as Stallybrass and White, draw attention to the abject as a socially and culturally constructed object, rather than as having originated in immutable psychological conditions. The inversion of the grotesque body in the carnivalesque constitutes the sanctioned transgression of the taboo: a critique of the dominant ideology within the discursive confines of reason and knowledge established by high culture. The abject is momentarily privileged in the transgressive maneuver, but all of this is accomplished within the logic of the taboo.
Stallybrass and White stress the avoidance of idealizing the carnival (197). "It would be wrong to associate the exhilarating sense of freedom which transgression affords with any necessary or automatic political progressiveness" (201). Throughout their book, both authors are careful to stress the appropriation of the transgressive carnival for the purposes of bourgeois transcendence, particularly those of the hysteric, where the marginalized forms of the carnival reemerge as a potential site of neurosis (172, 180-81). Thus, their work would seem to be more substantively aligned with Kristeva than with the "defeated" discourse of Bataille. The experience of abjection is associated with bourgeois experience more generally; it is a function of class rather than sociology or psychology. They write that
the bourgeois subject continuously defined and re-defined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as `low'--as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating. Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity. The low was internalized under the sign of negation and disgust. But disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains apparently expelled as `Other,' return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination (191).
This particular appropriation of abjection, being a cultural analytic influenced primarily by Bakhtin, is formalized in its emphases on significations of "high" and "low" in the bourgeois subject.
The class orientation of Freud's subjects are emphasized against the stipulations of primal conditions. The Rat Man's excitement at viewing Fraulein Lina pressing her abscesses on her buttocks during the evening represent his desire for the socially and physically "low," rather than the seduction by the powers of horror intrinsic to the object (152-3). The Rat Man's horror at hearing of a criminal's torture by rats burrowing into his anus is accompanied by an expression of exhilaration (144). But rather than primarily signifying anal eroticism, this transgressively abject moment reflects a bourgeois fascination with the "low," according to Stallybrass and White. Freud is thus faulted, particularly in his account of the Wolf Man, for his indifference to the social terrain (153). The Wolf Man's obsession with the maid's scrubbing of the kitchen floor is indicative less of the primal family romance, the Oedipal scene, than bourgeois fear and attraction regarding the lower status reflected in popular culture (156). "That overall process, the formation of the cultural Imaginary of the middle class in post-Renaissance Europe, involved an internal distancing from the popular which was complex and often contradictory in its effects....What starts as a simple repulsion or rejection of symbolic matter foreign to the self inaugurates a process of introjection and negation which is always complex in its effects" (193).
The perfectly ordered logic of transgression and taboo permits the festive forms of the carnival to reemerge in the bourgeois consciousness of the hysteric and the neurotic, not to mention critics such as Stallybrass, White, and Bakhtin. Any attempt to move from the cultural analytic of the carnival to a viable political praxis is frought with this limitation. Another problem can be seen in the often "uncritical populism" of the carnival, which "often violently abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups--women, ethnic and religious minorities, those who `don't belong'--in a process of displaced abjection" (19). This is an important political concept in its description of how lower social orders assume the structural reactions of official culture by turning their predation on still lower social classes. Stallybrass and White, for example, use this concept of displaced abjection to explain why pigs were chased and stoned during the Venetian carnival (53). Pigs, like cats, Jews, women, blacks, etc., became a locus of cultural hatred, the festive atmosphere of the fair permitting and licensing the transference of stigmata, a phenomenon very much akin to that of scapegoating, which also has an extensive anthropological history.
Denis Hollier has pointed out that during Bataille's days in the College of Sociology, he had planned a book on the carnival origins of democracy. This fact, coupled with his previously noted remarks on the festival, has perhaps led to a confusion, where Bataille's writings on the carnival are paired with those of Bakhtin. But whereas Bakhtin's festival is one of profundity and plenitude, where the subject disappears into the crowd, Bataille's is one of expenditure, loss, and emptiness. It is an experience imbued with anguish. According to Hollier,
...there is no one to say "I" anymore in Bakhtin's carnival, because the first person has disappeared, a joyful purge has swept subjects away in the great anonymous, or dialogic, sewer: the grammar of the irreplaceable has been excluded from the festivities. Bataille's carnival, on the contrary, is the moment in which the I lives its loss, lives itself as loss. This is not a time of plenitude, it is, on the contrary, the time when time's emptiness is experienced. This is not innocence rediscovered, but bottomless guilt (Hollier, Against...xxiii).
Consequently, Bataille's Acéphalus "does not merely represent a grotesque celebration of upside downs and bottoms up, but the more abysmal image of a topless bottom" (xxiii). Bataille emphasizes the sense of loss in the carnival rather than a mere joyful congealing in the space of "continuity." Thus, the concept of heterology, Bataille's neologism, "does not simply indicate a warm euphoric relationship to otherness." The carnival is always imbued with loss. There is "no Luna Park without a slaughterhouse," according to Hollier (xxiii).
This incongruity between Bataille and Bakhtin is born out further in Stallybrass' and White's explanation of transgression, which, as the logic of prohibition and violation, they are careful to differentiate from the so-called "extremist practices of modern art and philosophy," where one finds a "movement into an absolutely negative space beyond the structure of significance itself" (18). The notion of transgression as absolute negation is not, however, a view maintained by Bataille, as Michel Foucault has demonstrated. Transgression cannot be seen as ethical or dialectical, as Kantian or Hegelian, according to Foucault. Transgression is not negative; it cannot be associated with scandal or sedition. It must be seen, instead, as affirming "limited being" (PT 35). Bataille thus maintains a philosophy of "nonpositive affirmation," which Foucault takes as equivalent to Maurice Blanchot's principle of "contestation." Rather than a pure negation, thereby aligning it to the confines of ethical and dialectical reason, "contestation" is the "affirmation that affirms nothing" (PT 36). Thus, at the limit of experience, during the transgressive moment, the affirmative assent of contestation "leaves without echo the hee-haw of Nietzsche's braying ass" (PT 36).
Foucault's account of Bataille emphasizes the relation of transgression to the experience of limits, to Bataille's concept of inner experience, as well as the allied notions of continuity, communication, and the "impossible," rather than to the prohibition of law and its violation found in the logic of transgression and taboo. Within this logic, transgression serves as the completion of the taboo, rather than a departure from it (E 63). Not even if one were to pile transgression upon transgression would the taboo be abolished (E 48). Bataille points out that transgressions often lack liberty. They are regulated by rules very much like those of the taboo (E 65). He admits that unlimited or extreme transgressions do indeed occur. In the cases of the peoples of the Sandwich Islands and the Fiji Islands, an unlimited expenditure, that is to say, one limited only by duration and locale, of murder and orgiastic excesses follows the death of a sovereign; thus, "virulence is in full swing" (E 66-67). But while such extreme examples of transgression point to a space beyond the limit, they nevertheless maintain limits. Rather than destroying the profane world of work and utilitarian necessity, transgression serves as a complement to it (E 67). The profane world is the world of taboo and regulation; the sacred world is that of transgression. The sacred, however, contains two contradictory meanings, according to Bataille. The object of a prohibition is sacred because it is refused by the law of the taboo. At the same time, the object is also conferred the status of religious veneration in the form of fascination and awe (E 68). It both attracts and repels and is therefore abject. Because it must be excluded, the failure to do so constitutes abjection.
Revulsion and fascination are not necessarily intrinsic to the object but instead reflect its relation to the community. The feeling of nausea accompanying the smell of

excrement develops from a social taboo rather than a natural response. Bataille writes,
We imagine that it is the stink of excrement that makes us feel sick. But would it stink if we had not thought it was disgusting in the first place? We do not take long to forget what trouble we go to to pass on to our children the aversions that make us what we are, which make us human beings to begin with. Our children do not spontaneously have our reactions. They may not like a certain food and they may refuse it. But we have to teach them by pantomime or failing that, by violence, that curious aberration called disgust, powerful enough to make us feel faint, a contagion passed down to us from the earliest men through countless generations of scolded children (E 58).
Disgust, as one manifestation of abject repulsion, is a cultural construct rather than an immutable facet of nature. And yet, Bataille wants to emphasize the connection between attraction and repulsion to the indisputable existential domain of life and death. Life is a product of the decomposition of life (E 55). Moreover, our "spontaneous physical revulsion keeps alive in some indirect fashion at least the consciousness that the terrifying face of death, its stinking putrefaction, are to be identified with the sickening primary condition of life" (E 56). The combination of reactions of horror and fascination attend to these rudimentary natural experiences. But once the taboo against death is established, once the sense of disgust is attached by cultural mechanisms to the decaying corpse, to excreta, then abjection can be extended to other experiences because of certain natural connections. Bataille notes the relation between disgust, decay, the corpse, and excrement and obscene sensuality, for example. This link is derived from the fact that the sexual channels also serve as the "body's sewers" (E 57). Disgust preceded the sewer; the taboo created the cemetery as well as the septic tank. But while noting the cultural determination of abjection and the natural relation between life and death, Bataille seems to neglect elementary bodily sensations in his account, particularly pain and delight, which accompany experiences such as mutilation and sexual and dietary satiety. These are as basic as his existential emphases. The taboo against murder, for example, reflects a rational impulse to limit pain, as well as a mechanism to regulate the social sphere. The next section will attempt to flesh out this account of abjection and heterology through an examination of the experience of sensation found in the works of Sade and more particularly Sacher-Masoch.
Bataille, Stallybrass and White clearly demonstrate that transgression belongs within the logic of the taboo and cannot be seen as necessarily liberating nor politically progressive (Stallybrass 201). Even the most extreme cases of transgression are themselves subject to regulative limitations. As Michael Richardson has noted, excess is not capable of being isolated from order, though he does acknowledge that it serves as a means for "awareness," as a "sensible" alternative to asceticism (Richardson 23). Bataille repeatedly emphasized the viability of limit-experience, but one not reducible to pure "transcendence," allied more directly with idealism rather than materialism. Bataille's defeated discourse would never permit an overcoming, an escape. The practitioners of New Historicism, however, would be more optimistic about the effectiveness of academic capital, something counter to the more persuasive pessimism of a Foucault.

Between the normal man who confines the sadistic man to an impasse and the sadistic man who makes this impasse a way out, it is the latter who knows more about the truth and logic of his situation and whose knowledge of it is deeper, to the point of being able to help the normal man to understand himself, by helping him to change the conditions of all understanding--Maurice Blanchot

If we start from the principle of denying others posited by de Sade it is strange to observe that at the very peak of unlimited denial of others is a denial of oneself--Georges Bataille

Sadomasochism is one of these misbegotten names, a semiological howler--Gilles Deleuze


Those who arrive at Bataille's writings for the first time usually begin with his perverse, scatalogical, ecstatic fictions. They often possess sentiments either of admiration, born out of a sense of provocation or rebellion, or disdain, emanating from an understandable scepticism about one's romantic capacity to transcend or transgress social norms through sexual excess or "scatalogical imperatives." He is often seen by the uninitiated as a Catholic novelist who has recently renounced his denomination. Neither view, caught as they are in a dialectic of idealization and condemnation, provides much more than a faint comprehension of his work as a whole.
Two persistent approaches to Bataille's work are equally misconstrued: either his fictions reveal him to be an "artist" exploring the darkest aspects of human psychology; or they merely represent in novel form what he has explored in his more discursive texts. I have demonstrated in the previous chapter his refusal of any association with the "artistic." After all, in an early Documents piece, he indicated his fancy with van Gogh's "automutilation," reflecting a larger concern with sacrifice more than artistic practice (VE 61-72). Representation assumes an object or event depicted--a hierarchical relation. In contrast, Allan Stoekl has characterized Bataille's theory of expenditure as one which amounts to "nothing," as "an oppositional term, an excluded element on which a coherent (intellectual, social) construction or formation nevertheless depends" (Stoekl, "Editor's Preface" 4). Thus, the limitation in attributing the concept of representation to Bataille's fictions becomes readily apparent: "nothing," lacking clear reference, cannot be represented.
Despite the characteristic misapprehensions of Bataille's fiction, this chapter is an attempt to read his novels and novellas in the context of his larger concerns of eroticism, excess, expenditure, the heterogeneous, the sacred and the profane, and the assault on humanism. We will query Bataille on why he writes such extravagant fictions; why he explores these issues in the fictional domain as well as the more discursive dimension of his oeuvre. How can sovereignty, that ultimate expression of individual separateness from the strictures of social conformity, be attained through the avenues of sexual excess and heterology? Or perhaps the question should be why does Bataille continue a literary tradition beginning with Sade of exploring sovereignty through pornographic or "pornologic" fiction? Isn't Bataille less sovereign than servile in duplicating to some extent the fictional idiom of Sade? Or can we characterize Bataille's and Sade's fictions as parallel at all?
The contention of this section, one concurrent with that of Carolyn Dean, is that Bataille's fictions are inherently masochistic. I will employ the insights of Gilles Deleuze to confirm this argument. Deleuze maintains a hard distinction between sadism and masochism, opposing any psychoanalytic linkage. His analysis is valuable in offering a fairly structural account of the features of sadism and masochism, using the exemplary texts of both, as they are represented by Sade and Sacher-Masoch respectively. Because he relies on these texts more so than a comparative history of practices, he will not provide a broader meaning for the terms sadism and masochism, so as to include a figure such as Gilles de Rais, a sadistic precursor to Sade, who fought alongside Joan of Arc in the fifteenth century. This will prevent Deleuze from drawing a conclusion similar to that of Dean--that Sade exhibits the characteristics of masochism, himself--an observation noted implicitly by Bataille.
Essentially, this chapter is an attempt to address the meaning of sadism and masochism as they relate to Bataille's work. A further question, however, must be posed: granted that these issues relate to his fiction and his work in eroticism more generally, why should we be interested in them or in Bataille's work at all? What does Bataille's fascination with morbidity have to say to the average reader concerned with cultural, sociological, political, and psychological issues? Beyond normative categories of abnormality and perversion, how do thinkers like Bataille and the poststructuralists address our current milieu, using their interests in sadism and masochism? If to characterize the transgressive as a species of surrealist idealization is to levy an injustice at Bataille and his followers, then what are the merits of an interrogation of heterology? What's the "use-value" of Bataille? And what is his "exchange-value" relative to other theoretical currencies? This chapter will adumbrate new openings for a theory of agitated bodies and senses as a necessary precondition of political and psychological transformation. Rather than an "aesthetics" of "taste" or of "judgment"--i.e. of a notion of aesthetics traditionally associated with the concept of art, with the perception and reception of art objects--I am advocating an aesthetics of "sensation." Only through agitated and intensified experience of bodies and senses can thought move from servility to sovereignty in Bataille's meaning of the terms. Intensified experience jars bodies from the profane world of utility and into the space of free expenditure, the realm of the sacred. The profane world of work and productivity, though necessary for the maintenance of life, also serves as the precondition for servility in the form of the reification of ideology. Heterological aesthetics points toward a possible way out of the statis of instrumental reason. If, as Sade explained in attribution to his libertines, the most acute sensations are communicated through the auricular organs, then perhaps the following narrative will edify one's socially transformative intensities (LE 123).
A. SADE AND THE ASSAULT ON HUMANISM
Much of Bataille's writing on the Marquis de Sade is concentrated on the question of normality. The normal or decent man for Sade exists as an abomination (E 178). This opposition is played out in the caricatures of virtue and vice, represented respectively by Justine and Juliette. Virtue is always seen as unfortunate to Sade, while vice is never fettered by unhappiness. While Juliette learns not to admit the reality of others, Justine errors by always elevating their importance. Justine constitutes the "servile" individual; Juliette is the fictional representation of the sovereign one. Normality (virtue) is typically equated with servility for Sade. The servile individual wastes her strength by using it for such "simulacra" as "other people, God, or ideals" (E 172). The sovereign being, in contrast, runs counter to the desires of others; he is not encouraged by the crowd (E 167). This discussion on normality and sovereignty is important to Bataille's critique of humanism, which will set the register for the postructuralists that follow.
As Jane Gallop states, Sade's work presents a "graphic parody" of the "characteristic gesture" emanating from "antihumanism," a term she uses to encompass the disparate projects of both structuralism and poststructuralism (Gallop 2). Accordingly, an antihumanist form of literary criticism undermines the presumed autonomy and individuality of authors and readers by "expropriating" them into a "determining network" of meaning. Bataille writes that "the course of human life inclines us to facile opinions: we represent ourselves as well-defined entities" (LE 122). By using Sade to deconstruct the seeming autonomy of authors and readers, Gallop exposes yet another variation of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic. The traditional author assumes a kind of Bataillian sovereignty that ends up as illusory. Hegel's master always requires recognition by its slaves. Bataille's and Sade's sovereign is always in solitude, always outside the dialectic, always in a language of denial (even, as we shall see, self-denial) (Gallop 18). Sade's writing is thus an exercise in giving destruction its fair due. What he reveals is that violence is the "deep truth at the heart of man" (E 184). The normal being believes this violence can be eliminated (E 185). But, as Bataille notes, "useless and dangerous violence cannot be abolished by irrational refusals to have any truck with it, any more than the irrational refusals to treat with death can eliminate that (death)" (E 187). Violent expenditure, like death, cannot be eradicated, cannot be legislated out of existence. In fact, violence never declares its existence nor its right to exist. It simply exists (E 188).
Much of Bataille's thinking regarding Sade develops out of exchanges with Pierre Klossowski, his colleague in the College of Sociology and the Acephale, the experimental secret society. Klossowski was among the first to note a relation between Sade's work and the French Revolution, and perhaps the most seminal idea to emerge from his work, influencing both Bataille and the postructuralists that follow, is the notion that nature destroys its own works in order to recover its most active power (Klossowski 21). Evil must break out in the social world in order that the world destroy itself (51). The necessity of regicide, the decapitation of Louis XVI, serves as a simulacrum of the putting to death of God (55). Thus, Sade's antihumanism involves a substitution. The "fraternity of the natural man" is replaced by the "solidarity of the parricide" (57). But after the tyrant is executed, ponders Klossowski, "can the social pact exist unilaterally for the citizens among themselves?" (58). The answer, in his reading of Sade, is a resounding "No!"
You have revolted against iniquity. For you iniquity consisted in being excluded from the practice of iniquity. In revolting against iniquity you have answered only with iniquity, since as your master had killed God in their consciousness, you have killed your masters. If you are not to return to servitude, justice, for you--and you have given bloody proofs of this--can consist only in the common practice of individual iniquity....Everything you undertake will henceforth bear the mark of assassination (58).
Such fraternity after the parricide abandons the requisite fact of transgression. Social solidarity involves a reenactment of the conditions of servility, the power of the crowd, Nietzsche's herd. Sade denies the comforting faith in "human emancipation" after the revolt. The supplanting of one dominant social order with another risks the danger of a new kind of stasis, to which only the perpetual motion of crime guarantees a way out from the delusion of sovereignty. As Bataille notes, to deny the imperative of
excess, of vice and expenditure, is to "languish and sink into a state rather like that of old men" (E 185).
According to Klossowski, Sade's ultimate metaphor for transgression, for his virulent antihumanism, is the act of sodomy (Klossowski 28). Sodomy is a "mockery" of the simulacrum of generation. It is a simulacrum of destruction. When performed on a member of the opposite sex, it serves as a simulacrum of metamorphosis (24). Because sodomy, for Klossowski, attacks the law of species reproduction, one must draw a clear distinction between it and homosexuality. Sodomy is intrinsically perverse, whereas homosexuality, permitting the rise of an institution, is not. The most important point for Klossowski on this score is that the pervert subordinates all forms of pleasure to the performance of a single gesture, in this instance, the act of sodomy (22-28). Pleasure comes in the form of an orgasm, which in the act of sodomy, according to Alphonso Lingis, operates as a metaphor, one of goring the partner and releasing the germ of the species in excrement (xiii). Orgasm, the "tribute paid to the norms of the species," marks a "fall out of ecstasy" and must be returned to base materiality, the monstrous denial of the elevated gesture of communication. The perverse gesture, structured by existing norms and

institutions, "introduces into the language of `common sense'...the nonlanguage of monstrosity" (25).
Sade's critique of humanism proceeded along several fronts--an assault on the pretensions of normality, which can be seen as structured by the institutions of humanism; the dubious traditional equation of sovereignty with artistic individuality and its aesthetic reception; the immutable fact of destruction in nature ; and the monological act of sodomy as the supreme exemplification of transgression. However, Sade's premier feat of antihumanism is a reversal of the traditional subordination of sensation to reason. Such a sense of "sensation" is largely uncommon, just as the acts described in his novels are unreasonable.
B. SENSATION VERSUS REASON:
PERPETUAL MOTION AGAINST THE RENUNCIATION OF NATURE
In her book, The Self and Its Pleasures, Carolyn Dean attempts to answer the question of what compelled Sade to write and proclaim his criminality by recourse to the writings of post-surrealists, like Bataille, Klossowski, Lacan, and Jean Paulhan. The answer, what she calls Sade's "secret," was the incapacity to be "heard." Sade constitutes a "tragic man," according to this account, "one who refuses the reduction of (his) existence to the condition of slavish instrument" (CS 13). Sade refused the requirement of utilitarian morality in favor of the frivolity of a useless expenditure of violent energy. He served as a symbol of "culture's inability to hear what a marginal man said" (Dean 172). Neither the surrealists nor the exemplars of bourgeois morality could "sense" (and here "hearing" stands as a metaphor for any and all the senses, including those senses not reducible to the five predominant empirical variety, encapsulated perhaps by the generic term "feeling") what Sade meant, because, as Dean points out, the former could not believe he "meant what he said," while the latter could only conclude that he "meant exactly" (i.e. literally) what he said (172). Sade's "limit-position" in Klossowski's terms, is thus described as the "paradoxical inability to be heard even as he spoke" (173). The surrealists' celebration of Sade, exemplified by Breton, managed metaphorically to restore the head to the king, a reproduction of culture rather than its acephalic disintegration.
The sense of Sade, of his "dirty, little secret," is the sense of a limit being surpassed. This limit is equivalent to the deconstructed cleavage between attraction and repulsion constituted by the abject, which was explained in the last chapter. Dean has termed this moment quite simply as the "pleasure of pain"; in Klossowski's vernacular, the term employed is delectatio morosa, a gloomy delight. Like the notions of abjection and heterology, this term is fluid in its designation. At one instant, it suggests "the enjoyment the soul finds in its own delirium, which liberates it from ennui"; but it also "consists in that movement of the soul by which it bears itself voluntarily toward images of forbidden carnal or spiritual acts in order to linger in contemplation of them" (Klossowski 113). And similarly, delectatio morosa represents a willful fidelity to a "spontaneous moment of revery" (114). In Klossowski's view, the "Sadean soul," constituted more by Sade's life than his works, only feels alive in a sense of "exasperation" (115). Most importantly, as a so-called "inverted spiritual exercise," delectatio morosa
consists in cultivating the memory of the senses frustrated of their object, and in converting this memory into a faculty that evokes the absent things. In the end, the very absence of the objects becomes the condition sine qua non for this faculty of representation in the frustrated sensibility (116).
Despite the "exasperating" resort to a vocabulary of the medieval Christian church, betraying his religious alliances during the 1940's when writing this particular analysis, Klossowski has managed to adumbrate a "sense" of the "experience" of Sade--a sense of desire doomed to perpetual obstruction. In Dean's terms, Klossowski's Sade is an "image of a man plagued by a rift deep in his interior," who "bore the burden of knowing who he could never be" (Dean 175). Sade represents aspirations of the "impossible," an unattainable moment. No social order is capable of permitting the conditions he desired. Thus, in Lingis' terms, his writing might be said to represent the "unthinkable" (Klossowski ix).
Klossowski has viewed Sade's writing not only as descriptive but also interpretive. What he calls the "aberrant act" is always imbedded with the experience of the sensuous, which coincides with reason. Sade, therefore, "humiliates reason with sensuous nature and humilates the `rational' sensuous nature with a perverse reason" (17). The "fact of sensing" requires no justification for Sade. Sensing is the "irreducible element in perversion." Instead, Sade chooses to justify the aberrant act which issues from sensuous nature. What makes the act aberrant is that "reason--even atheist reason--cannot recognize itself in it" (17).
Bataille demonstrates the significance of this coinciding of reason with the sensuous in a note on Krafft-Ebing's examination of sexual pathology. Works like those of Krafft-Ebing, while having an "objective awareness of forms of human behaviour," nevertheless "remain outside the experience of a profound truth revealed by this behaviour" (LE 124). The "profound truth" apparently lacking is that of desire. According to Bataille,
the consciousness of desire is hardly accessible: desire alone alters the clarity of consciousness, but it is above all the possibility of satisfaction which suppresses it. It appears that, for the entire animal kingdom, sexual satisfaction takes place in a `turmoil of the senses'. The fact that men should have such inhibitions about it, is due to that element which, though not entirely unconscious, is removed from clear consciousness (LE 124).
The strength of Krafft-Ebing's analysis rests in its capacity for an objective exterior knowledge. But without the "experience of desire" accompanying such knowledge, a "full consciousness" regarding human behavior is not really possible (LE 124).
Bataille distinguishes Sade from a normal or typical sadist in that while the latter is instinctive, Sade is philosophical in his quest for "clear consciousness," which paradoxically can only be reached through a "release" leading to a "loss of consciousness." Sade differs from the philosophers from the standpoint that the latter bring calm consciousness to an understanding of violent releases. Sade proceeds from violent releases toward clear consiousness (LE 115). In so doing, Sade deconstructed the "fundamental distinction between the release of passion and clear consciousness" (LE 119). He gave voice through writing to excessive desires that eluded the scrutiny of consciousness. The negation of such desires served as the means by which social organization, civilization, was ordered (LE 120). Sensuality, never reducible to the "agreeable and beneficent," always exhibits aspects of the horrid. Pleasure is always bound up with the paradoxical aspect of anguish (E 178). As Bataille puts the matter, "there is a turmoil, a sense of drowning, in sensuality which is similar to the stench of corpses" (LE 121). Thus, the necessity of crime, a term whose equivalence might be found in the notion of the repugnant, that which is completely "other" in Dean's formulation, becomes apparent. The most acute pleasures are criminal (E 169). Only through crime can the passions be inflamed (LE 120). By implication, the greatest criminal act, the one suggesting the highest degree of pleasure, is to violate the requirement of utilitarian productivity through the exuberant squandering of resources (E 170).
The form of pleasure articulated by Sade and Bataille would appear to be a composite of volupté and agrément, according to Jane Gallop (33). She explains the sign of volupté as a very keen sensual pleasure, an exceeding of a certain quantitative level of intensity (30). Agrément, though in certain contexts suggesting an "approval emanating from an authority," indicates a degree of non-utilitarian pleasure as well, for example, in the trip taken for pleasure as opposed to the one done for business. Accordingly, she accuses Bataille of misinterpreting Sade, for attributing volupté but not agrément to his work. Because agrément supposedly admits of both the non-utilitarian general economy of expenditure as well as the restricted economy of work and productivity, Bataille appears to be mistaken in assuming only a "profane" view of agrément. Yet the non-utilitarian examples cited by Gallop--propriété d'agrément, jardin d'agrément, and voyage d'agrément--connote a strikingly profane conventionality. The intensity suggested by volupté comports much more
accurately with the idea expressed by Bataille that Sadean pleasure is always undergirded by anguish.
Sade's primary insight is the conception of a nature destructive of its own works. Nature destroys in order that it maintain its active principle. Perpetual motion is all that is real; humans are but the changing phases of the general movement, one that Klossowski compares both to the Hindu doctrine of Samsara and Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return (90). Stasis and conservation are "reactive" rather than "active" phenomena. They constitute a renunciation of nature, conceived of here as the irretrievable other. Motion, whose exemplary representation can be found in desire, is active and is indicated by those aspects of life that suggest death--"corruption, putrefaction, dissolution, exhaustion, and annihilation" (90).
C. DELEUZE ON SACHER-MASOCH
The most famous work by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, begins with the dream of a narrator, who happens to meet Venus, wrapped in a great fur. She ventures she is beginning to understand the philosophy of the Germans and the qualities of their women--aspects of their cultural life she had previously taken to be "incredible" and "incomprehensible" (Sacher-Masoch 144). The narrator, she complains, a "northerner," is a "child of reason" therefore unable to love in a proper manner. After a lesson on the necessity of a woman's cruelty and domination in matters of love, the narrator awakens to the voice of a drunken Cossack--who happens to be a friend--alerting him he had fallen asleep with his clothes on and book in hand, both men past due for tea at the home of Severin, the primary narrator in the story. The book he holds, the one inducing somnolence due perhaps to its "incomprehensibility" or its basis in the history of "reason," was written by Hegel.
Sacher-Masoch provides an implicit criticism of western philosophy in his tale, very similar to Sade's virulent attack on philosophical humanism. Venus chastises the narrator for taking love too seriously, for overemphasizing the aspect of duty and formality against the primacy of pleasure. The so-called "modern man," seemingly evolved through the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism and empiricism en route toward the Hegelian Absolute, "cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity" (Sacher-Masoch 145). As Bataille had suggested, the one who attains objective knowledge without the "profound truth" of direct experience is servile to reason. Ecstatic pleasure, volupté or sensual intensity--the "accursed share," the excluded heterological "excrement" of rational thought--is the "blindness" that must be brought into recognition, into the "insight" of German philosophy. In the presence of the cold rationalism of the narrator, strongly accentuated in all likelihood by a revelatory reading of Hegel, the Venus in furs, the seeming harbinger of "coldness and cruelty," shivers ceaselessly.
Sacher-Masoch might be said to anticipate the argument Gilles Deleuze will present in his book on the nineteenth century novelist and historian. Deleuze's work attempts to wrest the fictions of Sacher-Masoch from the imposed dialectical and clinical relations to Sade. Deleuze maintains a "literary approach" rather than one that would speciously draw an artificial opposition between the two phenomena of sadism and masochism and assume a dialectical unity between them. For Deleuze, "the clinical specificities of sadism and masochism are not separable from the literary values peculiar to Sade and Masoch" (CC 14). This is his key position. Accordingly, he will make no effort to see any precursors to Sade and Sacher-Masoch exhibiting features of the particular clinical conditions of sadism and masochism. The clinical conditions are of far less significance to the particularity of Sade and Sacher-Masoch as writers.
But while Deleuze argues that Sacher-Masoch has been treated unjustly in being appropriated in a dialectical relation to sadism by psychoanalysis, he also asserts that Sacher-Masoch's writing is nonetheless "animated by a

dialectical spirit" (CC 22). This "spirit," however, is less Hegelian than Platonic. He writes:
Plato showed that Socrates appeared to be the lover but that fundamentally he was the loved one. Likewise the masochistic hero appears to be educated and fashioned by the authoritarian woman whereas basically it is he who forms her, dresses her for the part and prompts the harsh words she addresses to him. It is the victim who speaks through the mouth of his torturer, without sparing himself. Dialectic does not simply mean the free interchange of discourse, but implies transpositions or displacements of this kind, resulting in a scene being enacted simultaneously on several levels with reversals and reduplications in the allocation of roles and discourse (CC 22).
It is odd given these remarks that Deleuze will later contend, in admitting that Sade's characters exhibit aspects of masochism (just as Sacher-Masoch's have certain sadistic qualities), that the masochism apparent in some of Sade's libertines never detracts from their mastery (CC 39). It is as if he is implying that the masochistic educator has no mastery, when in fact he teaches his torturer in Venus in Furs.
According to the masochistic impulse, in order to contemplate the naked body of a woman, one needs to be in a "mystical frame of mind," amounting to a fetishization of the body (CC 22). The ideal of the Greek goddess is primary for Sacher-Masoch, one of "pure bliss and divine serenity" (Sacher-Masoch 145). Venus catches cold in the "icy realm of Christianity" (CC 53). The ideal is realized in the cruelty of the woman torturer. Her cruelty constitutes for

Deleuze "the specific freezing point, the point at which idealism is realized" (CC 55).
Deleuze distinguishes Sade from Sacher-Masoch on several fronts. One of the most important involves their respective uses of descriptions. Whereas Sade's "demonstrative" descriptions are relatively independent of any contract or ritual, i.e. "obscene in themselves," Sacher-Masoch's "dialectical" work "is on the whole commendable for its unusual decency" (CC 25). While Sade spent most of his adult life in prison, in good part because of his writings, Sacher-Masoch was honored for capturing the spirit of Slavonic folklore (CC 26). While Sade's world is patriarchal, Sacher-Masoch is noteworthy for the supremacy of the mother and expulsion of the the father. Sacher-Masoch reverses the Lacanian symbolic in his construction of an "intermaternal order" (CC 63). He basically idealizes the functions of the bad mother, transferring them to the good mother (CC 62). Sacher-Masoch's fiction, in sum, is anti-Oedipal.
In addition to fetishism, the masochistic experience is marked by several characteristics: the postponement of pleasure ; the use of suspense as a narrative motif; the art of suggestion, especially with regard to obscenity, which is not so much absent as hinted, suspended, or postponed; education and persuasion rather than prescriptive instruction; the use of contracts and advertisements; fantasy; two aspects of disavowal--one of the law or mother and the other the expulsion of the father from the symbolic register (CC 68); pain, punishment, and humiliation as prerequisites to gratification (CC 71); the predominance of ritual and myth (CC 102); and the use of imagination as a mode of a general aestheticism. Deleuze views fetishism as quintessential to masochism, the principal objects in Sacher-Masoch's work being furs, shoes, whips, strange helmets and various disguises. The masochist "does not believe in negating or destroying the world nor in idealizing it: what he does is to disavow and thus suspend it, in order to secure an ideal which is itself suspended in fantasy" (CC 32-33). The existing reality is questioned in favor of a fantasized or purely ideal one. In the masochistic process of disavowal, sexual pleasure is postponed, disavowed for as long as possible. As Deleuze notes, "the masochist is therefore able to deny the reality of pleasure at the very point of experiencing it, in order to identify with the `new sexless man'" (CC 33).
Suspension operates both figuratively and actually in masochism. The masochist is often hung up physically, suspended or crucified, and the woman torturer occasionally "freezes into postures that identify her with a statue, a painting or a photograph" (CC 33). Often she arrests her movement in order to view herself in a mirror. The element of dramatic suspense, similar to that of the mystery novel, is also particular to masochism. Sadism is characterized by the repetition of the gesture or event, causing the reader to identify with the sadistic hero. Masochism, in contrast, forces identification with the victim through an aesthetic of suspense (CC 34). Suspension is the means by which potential obscenity is circumvented. Obscenity is hinted through suggestion but rarely made explicit. Descriptions are thus displaced "either from the object itself to the fetish, or from one part of the object to another part, or again from one aspect of the subject to another" (CC 34). The result is an oppressive atmosphere akin to a "sickly perfume permeating the suspense and resisting all displacements" (CC 34). The dramatic use of suspense and suggestion leads Deleuze to note that, with regard to Sacher-Masoch and unlike Sade, "no one has ever been so far with so little offense to decency" (CC 34).
Disavowal is carried out through three forms of practice by the masochist. Deleuze enumerates them as follows:
the first magnifies the mother, by attributing to her the phallus instrumental to rebirth; the second excludes the father, since he has no part in this rebirth; and the third relates to sexual pleasure, which is interrupted, deprived of its genitality and transformed into the pleasure of being reborn (CC 100).
This theorization of the anti-oedipal, anti-genital "becoming" of a man signifies not so much a "child being beaten" as a "father being beaten," according to Deleuze (CC 99). Masochism thus reverses the contractual state of affairs in the patriarchal system in favor of the mother (CC 92). But for Sade, law represents rule of a "secondary nature"; it constitutes a "usurpation of true sovereignty" (CC 86). Sade opposes the law with the creation of anarchic institutions of perpetual motion. While the contract implies free consent, institutions are compulsory and involuntary. Sade's great insight is therefore a challenge to legalistic and contractual terms (CC 79). Without the abandonment of law and the setting up of institutions of perpetual motion, the revolution of 1789 threatens to become sterile. Sacher-Masoch's humorous solution in the political domain is a voluntary contract with a terrible "Tsarina," an autocratic woman who compels obedience (CC 93).
Deleuze, after theorizing in rather inverse Lacanian terms that the contract invests the "mother-figure" with the "symbolic" form of the law, asks but does not answer a question about why a contract is necessary to begin with. He only asserts that the masochist cannot do without it either in actuality or in a mental fabulation. Does the contract necessarily imply the prevalence of the law, either consensually or institutionally? Moreover, is Deleuze's dichotomy between the law and the institution credible or specious? The concept of fabricating anarchic institutions in Sade seems rather paradoxical, an ostensible freedom that turns out to be illusory. The selling of an apparent consensual arrangement by a masochistic "educator" also looks incongruous. If an accord is reached, why the imposition of a contract? Why would an agreement necessitate the psychological manufacturing of the "form" of a contract? Couldn't the mere query of a willingness to participate do just as well in a less serious vein?
We must question Deleuze on his literary predetermination of the characteristics of sadism and masochism through the respective writings of Sade and Sacher-Masoch. Just as there were sadists before Sade, there must certainly have been masochists before Sacher-Masoch. Did they exhibit all the facets attributed by Deleuze to Sade and Sacher-Masoch? The question becomes one of quantity as well as quality. Should the classification of masochism be measured by the exhibit of three characteristics outlined by Deleuze? Four? Five? Is the contract necessary in every instance? Should Sacher-Masoch's work be the sole means of determination? Is the Sadean hero, the libertines depicted in The 120 Days of Sodom, qualitatively different from a Gilles de Rais, a precursor to the sadist by over three hundred years (We might note that there appear to be no entities who exist and are called "raisians," sun-dried or otherwise.)

We may concur with Deleuze and refuse acknowledgement of a so-called "sadomasochistic" entity as a "preconceived etiology" obscuring the whole concrete situation (CC 58). But while diseases are typically named after their symptoms rather than their causes, what might be said to constitute a sufficient quantity in order that one disease be designated as opposed to another? Deleuze's "literary" point of view carries with it a number of limitations. What we hope to discover in the next section is that Sade, the man who employs the language of a "victim," as noted by Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, the one who cannot be truly classified as a torturer because he refuses to use the language of authority, the language of "silence" as Bataille calls it, the one who wrote himself into twenty seven years of prison by saying "everything," by being everything but silent, exhibits more of the characteristics of masochism rather than sadism.
Nevertheless, Deleuze has quite clearly articulated how Sade and Sacher-Masoch have alerted philosophical understanding to the significance of sense. Their contribution is not metaphysical or epistemological: they do not aim at describing the world yet another time, but instead "define a counterpart of the world capable of containing its violence and excesses" (CC 37). They create a "counter-language" directly affecting the senses, returning thought to sensual experience and away from purely intellectual understanding (CC 37). According to Deleuze, "words are at their most powerful when they compel the body to repeat the movements they suggest" (CC 18).
Deleuze points out the crucial aesthetic aspect of Sacher-Masoch's work which he also describes as a plastic element. This notion of the aesthetic is closely aligned with that of art, for after some initial discussion of the senses, he moves into comments about Sacher-Masoch's use of cold, statuesque figures, frozen in a manner resembling portraits. He writes:
It has been said that the senses become "theoreticians" and that the eye, for example, becomes a human eye when its object itself has been transformed into a human or cultural object, fashioned by and intended solely for man. Animal nature is profoundly hurt when this transmutation of its organs from the animal to the human takes place, and it is the experience of this painful process that the art of Masoch aims to represent. He calls his doctrine "supersensualism" to indicate this cultural state of transmuted sensuality; this explains why he finds in works of art the source and the inspiration of his loves (CC 69).
Severin borrows from Goethe in employing the term "supersensual," which originates in the German Ubersinnlich and reflects, as well, Sinnlichkeit, a term denoting both flesh and sensuality (CC 21). In this sense, supersensualism signifies an experience similar to Bataille's notion of eroticism, couched in a duality of pleasure and anguish.
The experience of transmutation is one of loss, but Sacher-Masoch finds a return to the senses through the experience of the forms of art. It is odd that Deleuze fails to note that Sacher-Masoch's resolution of cultural transmutation comes in the realm of culture itself, even if in a formal manner. In this sense, Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch are less radical than Sade, whose characters eschew the collecting of art. Art is inadequate for Sade as a means for representing the experience of perpetual motion. As Sade notes,
Ah, if only an engraver could record for posterity this divine and voluptuous scene? But lust, which all too quickly crowns our actors, might not have allowed the artist time to portray them. It is not easy for art, which is motionless, to depict an activity the essence of which is movement (quoted in CC 70).
Sade has an aesthetic, one directly in line with the experience of the senses and not reducible, as the passage makes apparent, to the notion of art itself. While Sacher-Masoch makes apparent his fascination with arrested movement, with the coldness of suspended images, Sade is a virulent advocate of movement without arrest. But this should not suggest that while Sade and Sacher-Masoch are significantly different with respect to movement, they do not have prominent zones of compatibility with respect to eroticism. No determination of the characteristics of sadism or masochism should depend solely on the writings of the two novelists. In fact, under a novel interpretation of Sade's life, one might be led to conclude that he exhibits metaphorical aspects of masochism himself.


D. SADE'S AUTOPUNITIVE MASOCHISM
Much of the work on Sade refers to a singular event in his life, the storming of the Bastille, what Bataille called "the crucible in which the conscious limitations of being were slowly destroyed by the fire of a passion prolonged by powerlessness" (LE 125). Certain of his letters indicate he attempted to exhort the citizens into taking the prison where he wrote his unspeakable fictions. During the taking of the Bastille in 1789, his manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom disappeared, apparently stolen during the seige. Sade had been temporarily moved to another prison after apparently inciting passersby about the Terror. He claimed afterward to have wept "tears of blood." The manuscript was recovered over one hundred years later when the Sadean scholar Maurice Heine purchased it from a German collector. Sade had mourned the loss of a manuscript which served as his gift to the world of other people. The message of that gift, as Bataille noted, was to "reveal--to other men, observe--the truth of the insignificance of other people" (E 169). The ironies abound. Sade's effort to foment the populace into revolt achieves a desired result with an unwitting consequence. Paradoxically unable to deny the reality of others, wishing their recognition from reading his work, writing fiction that also aimed to deny the reality of others, Sade is unable to fulfill his intention--a form of unexpected self-denial--perhaps the only conceivable repercussion from the world he constructs. As Bataille so aptly observes, "if we start from the principle of denying others posited by de Sade it is strange to observe that at the very peak of unlimited denial of others is a denial of oneself" (E 174). The unlimited denial of others marks a "quest for an inflexible sovereignty," which turns out to be no sovereignty since it assumes no obligations (E 174).
Cruelty, in Bataille's account, has the same result. It "is nothing but a denial of oneself carried so far that it becomes a destructive explosion" (E 173). While the value of others requires the encumbrance of limits on oneself, Sade's "ruinous eroticism" constitutes the surpassing of such limits (E 171). Thus, the Sadean libertines "who live only for pleasure are great only because they have destroyed in themselves all their capacity for pleasure" (E 173). They prefer the "frightful anomaly" in opposition to the "mediocrity of ordinary sensuality" (E 173). In beginning with a sense of "utter irresponsibility," Sade ends with "stringent self-control," what might also be described as "apathy," a denial of passion in favor of the cold reiteration of abominable acts. The Sadean experience is accordingly imprinted with its own form of disavowal. Apathy suggests an erasure of passion, an indefinite postponement of pleasure through its denial, what Deleuze calls in rather strong terms "negation" (CC 35).
A strong element persists in Sade's work which is self-punitive. As Bataille noted, the implication of the ceaseless destruction of objects of desire is the possible wish of the executioner to be tortured himself. Sade expressed his desire of not wanting his tomb to survive and of having his name fade from memory (LE 116). Bataille claims evidence exists in Marseilles that Sade even "tore his flesh with whips whose thongs were edged with pins" (LE 119). However, as Blanchot argues, the ultimate form of automutilation in Sade is the very fact of his writing and the necessity of saying everything (IC 229). "Writing is the madness proper to Sade" (IC 221). Rather than remaining silent, Sade chose to write, and for this he was imprisoned. What he wrote was not allowable in any social order, the predominant one of his day refusing him the permission of liberty. Writing became his mode of sovereignty but also the pain, punishment, and humiliation prior to rapture (CC 71). Writing forced his imprisonment, and conversely imprisonment compelled his writing. Sade's masochism was his refusal to stop writing despite the obvious dangers, danger being in all likelihood the source of an ecstatic pleasure. But this did not make him into a romantic revolutionary, since, as Blanchot demonstrated, his novel Justine served as the "impossible" language of the Terror, as a political wellspring for the post-revolutionary

practice of torture inspiring Robespierre and Saint-Just (IC 227).
The necessity of saying "everything" is used by Bataille and Blanchot to claim that Sade, despite his writings, could not be seen as truly aligned with the torturer, who, as we noted earlier, is always in the service of authority, therefore, employing its language. For Bataille, violence is always silent (E 186). He ventures that had such libertines as those who appear in Sade's work actually existed, they would have lived in silence. Sade's attitude, in contrast, as the "mouthpiece of silent life," is just the opposite. The cases of the silent but brutal Gilles de Rais, who quietly murdered multitudes of children in France in the fifteenth century, and the more recent example of Jeffrey Dahmer are useful in this light.
Jean Paulhan was among the first to apply a masochistic interpretation to Sade's life. He saw Sade as basically a moralist--but one about evil rather than good. His insistence on writing about the truth about human vice and its pretense toward virtue amounted to a virtuous exercise of its own. Sade's writing thus ends up being a metaphor of the lesson Justine refused to learn--that virtue is never rewarded (Dean 181). The desire for virtue is in essence masochistic, and as Sade's writing also served as a metaphor for an unattainable ideal, an impossible sovereignty resting on the denial of others, his writing is also a metaphor of failure. Masochism in this instance is a metaphor for that failure (Dean 178). Sade's masochism, consequently, is founded on three premises: he insisted on living virtuously while recognizing virtue to be a sham; he never relented, neither in his writing nor in his principle, in displeasing political authority, for which he spent twenty seven years in prison; he continued writing despite the obvious perils. Sade's virtue was thus to call the "idea of virtue into question by demonstrating to what extent it is part of an insidious and oppressive cultural logic" (Dean 183). Masochism is thus aligned with self-sacrifice. In Sade's stance, in his determination to write, writing becomes the guillotine for auto-decapitation, an autopunitive effacement of the writer. Masochism in this instance is not merely limited to the totality of Deleuze's descriptions, nor rigidly to the texts of Sacher-Masoch himself, but operates as a metaphor outside clinical determinations. We have moved from the literary to a more semiotic comprehension of masochism.
E. BATAILLE'S MASOCHISTIC FICTIONS
A number of contemporary theorists, including Susan Sulieman and Carolyn Dean, have taken note of the "Coincidences" section in Story of the Eye, where Bataille considers various correlations between his fiction and his life. Particularly ripe for interpretation is an incident in which his syphilitic and blind father, having gone insane while "endlessly and eloquently imagining the most outrageous and generally the happiest events," is visited by a doctor after "literally howling in his room" (SE 94). After an examination, the doctor confers with Bataille's mother in the next room, at which point his father, shrieking loudly, demands, "Doctor, let me know when you're done fucking my wife!" (SE 94). For Bataille, the event was unparalleled in its effect on his life. He writes:
For me, that utterance, which in a split second annihilated the demoralizing effects of a strict upbringing, left me with something like a steady obligation, unconscious and unwilled: the necessity of finding an equivalent to that sentence in any situation I happen to be in; and this largely explains Story of the Eye (SE 94-5).
In Sulieman's account, the father reveals to the son that the mother's body is sexual. "The recognition of the mother's body as female, and desirable--a recognition forced on the son by his blind but still powerful father--is thus designated as the source of the narrator's pornographic imagination" (Sulieman 85). But Sulieman ignores the aspect of violence inherent in his father's language. It is the fusion of violence and sensuality which is explored most profoundly in Story of the Eye, as well as Bataille's other writings. Moreover, the exclamation made by his father does not so much aid the son in acknowledging his mother's sexuality. This admission has in all likelihood already been admitted through normal Oedipal urges. What the remark suggests is the father's incapacity, his impotence and immobilization--in Deleuze's terms, his abolition from the symbolic order.
In Bataille's case, the vociferation marks a culmination in the regression of his father's metaphorical stature. Bataille begins the "Coincidences" by confessing his anti-Oedipal, homoerotic love for his father. By the age of fourteen, this love is transformed into an unconscious hatred, reflected in his sadistic enjoyment of his father's increasing suffering. In Deleuze's account of masochism, the father is symbolically abolished, while the mother is idealized (CC 63). Masochism, like Bataille's fictions, is anti-Oedipal. The law, in a reversal of Lacan, is linked with an intermaternal order.
Bataille's fictions are dominated by figurative, sexual mothers, who typically initiate masochistic narrator/sons into the licentious life of the flesh. When not literally mothers, these dominant figures are feminine libertines: Eponine in L'Abbe C; Dirty (Dorothea), particularly, as well as Xenie in Blue of Noon; Maria in The Dead Man; Simone in Story of the Eye; and Madame Edwarda in the story of the same name.
Simone stands above the rest as perhaps the most provocative, alluring, and elusive fictional creation in recent literature. In contrast to the Sadean libertines, absorbed in an ascetic apathy, Simone and the narrator, both sixteen, in Story of the Eye are obsessed by passion and excess. The narrative is structured in a manner similar to that of Sacher-Masoch: climactic moments are perpetually postponed or disavowed; the feminine figure is transformed into the dominant one in the story--she is idealized; objects resembling the eye, including eggs and bull testicles, are fetishized; actions are often only suggested, creating an aura of suspense. Perhaps most significantly, pain and punishment are usually preliminary to any sexual gratification.
The consummation of Simone's and the narrator's sexual agitations waits until fifty pages, more than half way into the narrative, after the death of Marcelle, an occasional if reluctant participant in the others' debauchery. Ridden with abjection over the unspeakable excesses of Simone and her companion, Marcelle loses her mental faculties, eventually hanging herself. Finding her body precipitates their sexual union.
I cut the rope, but she was quite dead. We laid her out on the carpet. Simone saw I was getting a hard-on and she started jerking me off. I too stretched out on the carpet. It was impossible to otherwise; Simone was still a virgin, and I fucked her for the first time, next to the corpse. It was very painful for both of us, but were glad precisely because it was painful (SE 50).
After the act, after death, a sense of boredom predominates, one strangely similar to the apathy of the libertines. As the narrator notes, "...the lack of excitement made everything far more absurd, and thus Marcelle was closer to me dead than in her lifetime..." (SE 51). In anger and fright, Simone completes the scene by urinating on the corpse of Marcelle.
The requirements of pain, punishment and humiliation as a preliminary to sexual pleasure are quite evident in several episodes at the bullfights. Simone's propensities toward intensified experience are realized particularly well during the initial bull's disemboweling of a mare.
There were actually three things about bullfights that fascinated her: the first, when the bull comes hurtling out of the bullpen like a big rat; the second, when its horns plunge all the way into the flank of a mare; the third, when that ludicrous, raw-boned mare gallops across the arena, lashing out unseasonably and dragging a huge, vile bundle of bowels between her thighs in the most dreadful wan colors, a pearly white, pink, and gray. Simone's heart throbbed fastest when the exploding bladder dropped its mass of mare's urine on the sand in one quick plop (SE 56).
Her own penchant for despoiling by urination is reflected in her interest in the erupting mare's bladder.
Simone also reverses the tradition of certain amateur toreadors, who consume the roasted testicles of one of the first bulls to be killed. She requests on this specific occasion that they be raw. A sense of disgust on the part of their complicitor, Sir Edmond, and other spectators at the bullfight will be necessary for Simone's eventual jouissance. She sits on the raw "balls" while viewing the star Granero fighting the fourth bull. She seems to get a comparable thrill from returning the gaze of the spectators observing her actions, as well as from the expressions of

the narrator and Sir Edmond, who are both annoyed at excessive attention she happens to be getting.
The killing of the first bull also serves as an impetus for Simone and the narrator, who steal away into a sordid
outhouse for a brief but intense copulation. The pain of the bull at death inspires their passion.
She took my hand wordlessly and led me to an outer courtyard of the filthy arena, where the stench of equine and human urine was suffocating because of the great heat. I grabbed Simone's cunt, and she seized my furious cock through my pants. We stepped into a stinking shithouse, where sordid flies whirled about in a sunbeam....A bull's orgasm is not more powerful than the one that wrenched through our loins to tear us to
shreds, though without shaking my thick penis out of that stuffed vulva, which was gorged with come (SE 61).
At the real and figurative climax of the chapter, Granero is killed by the bull, who thrusts one of his horns through the right eye of the toreador and into his head. The eye dangles from the point of contact. Concurrent with the killing, Simone, having inserted one of the bull's testicles into her genitalia, experiences an orgasm so intense, she is "lifted up from the stone seat only to be flung back with a bleeding nose, under a blinding sun" (SE 64). At the pivotal moment of the bull's conquest, she experiences the sacred in the form of a psychic synchronization with the animal world, a communication in Bataille's sense, but one that is virulent rather than romanticized.
Other incidents of disavowal partaking of the doublet of pleasure and pain take place when the three principals travel to Seville. Simone and the narrator have constant sex but without orgasm (SE 66). Then Simone exposes the masochism of a priest prior to murdering him during sexual intercourse. The narrator and Sir Edmond exchange the corresponding role of the "Greek," the third male party who usurps the masochist, from Sacher-Masoch's novels. First, she slaps the priest, which gives him an erection (SE 75). Then he is heaped with ritualistic abuses, including being forced to drink Simone's urine prior to ejaculating (SE 77). Urine and sperm represent the antithesis of the logic of the Eucharist (the presumed body and blood of Christ), according to the analysis of Sir Edmond (SE 76).
While Bataille's story seems to resemble Sade's in many respects, including the heterological nature of the text as well as the libertinism of Simone and the narrator, an important structural disparity remains. While Sade's libertines eschew the passions through apathy, Bataille's display them. But his narrative, though descriptive, lacks the demonstrative dimension of Sade's. Moreover, he exhibits the technique of indefinite postponement, the experience of "a pure form of waiting," as Deleuze called it. For Bataille, like perhaps Sacher-Masoch, the orgasm is deferred before being eventually experienced. For Sade, it is perpetually prevented by apathy. Unlike the phallocentrism of Sade, Bataille's eroticism in Story of the Eye is distinct in emphasizing the spherical metaphor rather than the phallic one, as Roland Barthes has pointed out. His "originality" is in the equivalence of the "ocular and genital," a paradigm beginning "nowhere" (Barthes 242).
The characteristics of masochism are apparent in most of Bataille's fictions. In L'Abbe C, both Charles and Robert desire repeated suffering, even if by self-annihilation (96, 128). In Robert's case, this must take the more general form of an author destroying his own text to atone for the "transgression" of writing. In Blue of Noon, Dirty forces the narrator, Troppmann, to "grovel at her feet" (35). In a similar gesture of auto-mutilation to that of Robert's in L'Abbe C, Troppmann repeatedly stabs his left hand with his pen, metaphorically representing the author's self-destruction, but also as a means of inuring himself to pain (106). For Dorothea (Dirty), moreover, pain is a necessary prerequisite for happiness (131).
While these texts exhibit traits of masochism, Bataille's most inherently masochistic text by far is My Mother, the manuscript of which was found with his papers at his death. Unfinished, it was, nevertheless, nearly complete. The narrator, who happens to be named Pierre, reflecting perhaps one of Bataille's pseudonyms, Pierre Angelique, once again serves as the principal interpretive position. His mother is the central character. Unlike the passionate excess of Story of the Eye, My Mother carries an overwhelming sense of abjection. In a moderate reversal of the masochistic theme, the mother is positioned as both libertine and educator. She awakens Pierre's sexuality through both suggestions of incest and orchestrated liaisons with her bisexual lovers. It is intimated throughout that Pierre's mother is likely to be a prostitute. For example, the "fops" in the drawing room are assumed to have taken sexual liberties with Pierre's mother after he left the room. They did so, apparently, even in the presence of his father, suggesting, as well, another form of masochism, that
of being humiliated in witnessing a third party's copulation (MM 32).
Pierre's mother represents a diabolical form of the law, in this instance sexuality. Pierre's father, who is presumed to have died in 1906, has been metaphorically expelled from the symbolic order, represented by the novel. Throughout the narrative, the mother works both to torment and delight her son. His pleasure is always imbued with anguish.
The mother's treatment of Pierre combines elements of coldness and sexual enticement. At times they are enmeshed in an incestuous game of purely eye contact: "once again my mother's aroused gaze and mine met and they coupled" (MM 82). On one occasion she suggests to Pierre she could be his lover: "There's a kiss for you, until tomorrow night, my gallant lover!" (MM 29). Shortly thereafter, following a tortured scene, the mother and her son embrace. The scene carries overtones of eroticism as the mother's nightgown falls off her shoulders, Pierre embracing her half-naked body (MM 34). However, any consummation of incest with his mother would have ruined the ecstasy, the game (MM 87). The happiness Pierre experiences in hugging his mother is said to hurt him "like poison" (MM 65). But for the mother, this is only an indication that her education of Pierre is beginning to work.
"Are you beginning to see?" my mother went on. "Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison. All the rest is childishness" (MM 65).
Accordingly, she mixes her affection with coldness, much like Wanda in Sacher-Masoch's tale. Pierre's pretended illness early on is met with "scorn," "harshness," and "hostility" (MM 37-8). While claiming herself as unworthy, she still demands her son's submission, as Wanda does of Severin in Venus in Furs. At certain instances the gaze of Pierre's mother "looks daggers" at her son (MM 81). But Pierre learns to love his mother's scorn. He wants her to make him tremble, and he fantasizes being beaten by her (MM 80, 85). The purpose behind these variances in reaction--from extreme affection to undue coldness--is to train Pierre to face that which frightens him, repels him. The objective is one of education. As the mother states, "your one chance lies in facing up to what frightens you. You shall get back to your lessons" (MM 38).
As noted in Story of the Eye, an essential component of the masochistic experience is the necessity of pain and humiliation, abject repulsion, as a condition of satisfaction. This element is apparent in My Mother as well. Pierre's mother wants the love of her son but only if he knows her to be repulsive (MM 33). She employs the subterfuge of having Pierre clean his father's study before returning to his "lessons." But this is mere intrigue. Pierre's learning continues as intended when he enters the study and finds obscene photographs in the bookcases, for which his mother had given him the key. Bataille never describes the photos in detail. They include Pierre's father and mother, along with tall men with thick moustaches wearing garters and women's stockings, who appear to charge the often stout figures of other men and girls--a carnivalesque scene, but one bending gender norms according to the brief descriptions. Presumably the photos had other obscene features as well, but these are only suggested. The quality of suspense permeates the narrative, especially with respect to the lack of detail. Pierre's reaction combines repulsion and absorption.
I looked at those pictures and trembled but I made the trembling last. I lost control and helplessly sent the remaining piles flying. But I had to pick them back up...My father, my mother and this swamp of obscenity...out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. I stared down at what I was already grasping in my hand, like an ape; I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers. Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them (MM 41).

The repulsive postures of the figures in the photographs actually delighted Pierre, who experiences something like a "comic unpleasantness." The scene recalls Bataille's youthful realization of his mother's sexuality when his father is attended by a doctor following a syphilitic fit. As Pierre notices, "inherent in motherhood, I told myself, is the doing of that which in children causes these terrible convulsions" (MM 41). The mother's intention in having Pierre clean the study is sadistic. She, herself, was repelled by the photos. But having her son see them as well, having him become equally disgusted, makes her ecstatic (MM 43).
The trait of suspense characteristic of masochism is apparent as well in dinner scene between Pierre, his mother, and her young lover Rhea. It is only intimated that Rhea is the mother's lover, suggested in the comment that Pierre's mother is not particularly fond of men (MM 61). The mother speaks of "unspeakable appetites." Accordingly, she does not mention what they are. She only hints; she does not describe. Once again, contrary to the method of Sade, imagination in form of suspense prevails over demonstration. As a consequence, Pierre's intercourse, his initiation, with Rhea becomes a substitute for incest--a means at getting at the inaccessible, the "unspeakable" in his mother (MM 76).
The references to Sacher-Masoch become even more explicit near the end of the novel. In one scene Pierre imagines being beaten by his mother's one-time lover Hansi and deriving pleasure from it. In the sequence following the revery Hansi appears wearing a riding crop and carrying a whip: "At my feet!" she ordered. "Eyes on my boots!" (MM 102). Like Pierre, Hansi's lover Lulu also takes pleasure in being beaten. She extols "female masochism."
"Oh, I don't need to be told that nothing is a greater bore than masochism. But--and I take advantage of it--I'm pretty enough, I get away with a lot thanks to my looks. A madwoman who likes other women is in any case very easy to handle. Men make sterner masters, but they are apt to be more of a nuisance. Female masochists who like women make good friends, useful in all sorts of ways..." (MM 113-14).
Later, it becomes apparent that Pierre's mother is planning to return to join the debaucheries. Suffering is clearly immanent, but it is one that portends joy to Hansi: "Rejoice, we are going to suffer, and we shall help you share our suffering, so as to change it into joy" (MM 130).
Masochism, that fusion of pain and pleasure, especially pain as a preliminary exigency to the experience of pleasure, constitutes a form of intensity through the means of passion and excess, a form of awareness very much commensurate to the experience of the sacred. According to Pierre, "that abolishing of limits...appeared to me more profound than the sermon of the priest in the chapel, appeared to me more holy. I saw there the greatness of God where I had always seen only the limitlessness, the unmeasurableness, the mindless frenzy of love" (MM 116). Similarly, through her crimes, through crime in general, does Pierre's mother appear "nearer to God than anything...perceived through the window of the Church" (MM 50). In Bataille's fictions as well as his theoretical writings, we note the primacy of the experience of the senses, the "unknowing," over any epistemic certainty, over any knowledge obtained through the filter of rational process, a mode of cultural appropriation.
Carolyn Dean argues that while Bataille's fiction reinforces the law of the father, it does so in new terms. In apparently writing about the mother, Bataille's fictions are in fact not about the mother but about "how the son copes with the paternal prohibition" (Dean 240). Thus, his "literary obsessions are not unmediated expressions of desire but displacements that symbolize repressed desire, like dreams" (Dean 240). This aspect of repression aligns his work against the paternal prohibition, the mother being a representation of Bataille's repressed desire, an overcoming of patriarchal strictures. Repression constitutes Bataille's pleasure (Dean 242). Dean sees Bataille's fictions as a "stunning portrait of the Oedipus complex," of the "dilemma of having to be a man one can never be," resulting in a "dialectic of self-punishment" (Dean 243). She defines this phrase as "the desire to be guilty which suspends guilt" (Dean 244). Bataille's theory of virility is one which recognizes that virility and castration are not incompatible--that is, one that acknowledges that due to castration, virility or manhood must been seen as the "impossibility of ever being a whole man" (Dean 243). Bataille's most important insight, according to Dean, is a theory of "how to live repression without going mad" (Dean 244). But how does one avoid madness? The answer is provided by Pierre's mother: "I have signed a pact with insanity and tonight it's your turn; it's your turn to sign" (MM 74). We have returned to Sacher-Masoch's contract, but in this instance it is not the law which matters, but the realization of that which is beyond the law--the "impossible," that which is outside the norms of representation and signification.
F. PORNOLOGY VERSUS PORNOGRAPHY:
AN ENCOUNTER WITH KATHY ACKER
Are Bataille's fictions pornographic? Do they have any merit beyond sexual excitation? Or should they be viewed, as many have with Sade's work, as books one can "read with one hand?" If they are pornographic, then what do we take to be the meaning of the term? Should feminists be troubled by Bataille's fictions, for his depiction of women and his portrayal of sexual excesses?
Despite the occasional objections to his work by extreme anti-pornographic feminists, like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, no facile solution to these issues is apparent. Dean has criticized Dworkin for employing the "same essentialist framework as those writers (like Sade and Bataille) she criticizes" (Dean 146). Moreover, Sulieman demonstrates that Dworkin's "deadpan" summary of Story of the Eye has the effect of flattening Bataille's narrative into a piece of "pulp pornography," thereby becoming indistinguishable from such novels as I Love a Laddie or Whip Chick, fictions with a much clearer pornographic intent (Sulieman 79). Dworkin is thus too absorbed in representation (Sulieman 80). Given Bataille's larger theoretical concerns with eroticism, to read him in the context of those pornographic works intended for mass consumption (and, therefore, capital) is to do a great injustice to his oeuvre as a whole. The point is not to romanticize Bataille, nor to defend him, but to read him and, in so doing, perhaps suspend momentarily some of the exigencies of our current social and political milieu so that his work might speak to it. This is the advantage of important works in critical feminist studies, like those of Dean and Sulieman.
The writings of Sade, Aretino, Cleland, and Restif de la Bretonne, to name a few, have had much to do with the invention of modern pornography, as a recent collection of writings, edited by Lynn Hunt, demonstrates. Their writings, however, are not reducible to the pornographic in its modern form. Pornography, today, as the Hunt collection goes to great pains to point out, was engendered from a complex history of social mores and practices, the predominant one being the democratization of culture, stemming in good part from technological developments in the print industry. The primarily Foucaultian approach of the Hunt collection starts with a very basic premise about what pornography is. According to Hunt,
if we take pornography to be the explicit depiction of sexual organs and sexual practices with the aim of arousing sexual feelings, then pornography was almost always an adjunct to something else until the middle or end of the eighteenth century. In early modern Europe, that is, between 1500 and 1800, pornography was most often a vehicle for using the shock of sex to criticize religious and political authorities....Pornography developed out of the messy, two-way, push and pull between the intention of authors, artists and engravers to test the boundaries of the "decent" and the aim of
the ecclesiastical and secular police to regulate it (Hunt 10).

The testing of boundaries and their enforcement by the law is clearly a reflection of the writings of Bataille and Sade on the exceeding of limits.
Pornography, she continues, is a particularly Western category defined by artistic and legal practice. It has a very specific "chronology" and "geography." The pornographic emerged as a category with a use-value for censors after the collapse of monarchical power following the French Revolution. As such, it cannot be reduced to a mode of empowerment for the category "men" against that of "women." But while Hunt's collection has the benefit of tracing the genealogy of pornographic practice from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, it is unable by definition to make the necessary fine-grade distinctions alluded to earlier by Sulieman, that is to say, after the advent of what Walter Benjamin has called the "age of mechanical reproduction." Pornography, concurrent with the advent of significant technological changes following the industrial revolution, became a practice of directives divorced from any context with regard to the sexual act. The movement of bodies as "things" during sex elided connections to philosophical thought, narrative context, or literary description. As opposed to its precursors in the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, pornography in the twentieth century is nothing more than tediously mechanical. It is, therefore, a great leap to say that the writings of Sade, Bataille, and Sacher-Masoch are coextensive with the productions of Hustler magazine. But one would be required to do so if one operated with the notion of the pornographic being the "explicit depiction of sexual organs and sexual practices with the aim of arousing sexual feelings." This general definition clearly applies to the highly capitalized products of Penthouse magazine and the Playboy channel. It is highly dubious that mere arousal is sole "aim" of Bataille's fictions.
Following the age of mechanical reproduction, bodies become equivalent to machine parts, as Robert Newman has pointed out. Pornography is characterized by the "underreaction" of the participants, who become metonymic substitutes for one another. This is the Sadean prototype, according to Newman, which is typified by apathy and the decontextualization of erotic agents (Newman 142). The pornographic narrative fetishizes the "corporeal sites" of abjection, as well as the "reader's or viewer's engagement by devaluing or eliminating context. By representing the feminine only as a hole to be filled by monolithic phallic meaning, pornographic narratives seek to incorporate the feminine as object while exiling it as subject" (Newman 11). This is especially apparent in the pornographic film, where the masculine figure effaces the pleasure of the feminine one by means of an ejaculation serving to cover her identity with that of his own (Newman 141). A work like Story of the Eye is said by Newman as serving as an implicit comment on the formulas it narrates. As we have seen, however, this novel is not simply reducible to its narrative antecedents, nor is it mere parody. As Newman, himself, notes, for Bataille, "engaging extreme experiences offers an understanding of the link between Eros and death" (Newman 143).
For a thinker like Sulieman, the difference between Bataille's fiction and works of pornography is comparable to the difference beween "insight versus blindness" (Sulieman 86). She wonders, nevertheless, why for writers like Bataille the woman's body is always the site of abjection, a question unanswerable for Andrea Dworkin because she hasn't taken into account Bataille's "specificity" (Sulieman 83). She writes, "insofar as the dominant culture has been not only bourgeois but also patriarchal, the productions of most male avant-garde artists appear anything but subversive" (Sulieman 83). Thus, writers like Bataille and Klossowski are "pseudo-subversive" rather than subversive. But Sulieman includes these writers in a twentieth century avant-garde originating with surrealism. Outside the context of Bataille's theory of eroticism, she cannot make the observation, as Carolyn Dean does, that Bataille's fiction reinforces the law but in new terms, that he opposes normalizing tendencies, that his father figure is "headless" (Dean 242, 249).
In the age of mechanical reproduction, the "blindness" of the pornographic is due to its instrumentalism. As Deleuze notes,
what is known as pornographic literature is a literature reduced to a few imperatives (do this, do that) followed by obscene descriptions. Violence and eroticism do meet, but in a rudimentary fashion (CC 17).
Thus, the works of Sade, Sacher-Masoch, and Bataille cannot be diminished to pornography, because their "erotic language cannot be reduced to the elementary functions of ordering and describing" (CC 18). Accordingly, Deleuze employs the more elevated category of "pornology," so as to capture the important distinction between capitalized, profane instrumentalism and sacred eroticism. He explains:
Pornological literature is aimed above all at confronting language with its own limits, with what is in a sense a "nonlanguage" (violence that does not speak, eroticism that remains unspoken). However this task can only be accomplished by an internal splitting of language: the imperative and descriptive function must transcend itself toward a higher function, the personal element turning by reflection upon itself into the impersonal (CC 22-3).
This comprehension is far removed from the utilitarian definition deployed by Lynn Hunt.
Despite Deleuze's vital differentiation between the pornographic and the "pornologic," the excesses of the libertine pose a significant problem for any politically engaged feminism with a socially responsible communitarianism as its aim. The libertine's fetishization of his object of desire, the violence of his attraction, and the wounds he inflicts recall all too readily our current milieu of the sadism of domestic and not so domestic violence, in response to which the "Take Back the Night" march serves as a collective wail of pain and a grand refusal. The Marquis de Sade does not effortlessly earn our forbearance and commiseration when we measure his writings against the testimony of Rose Keller, one of a several women who suffered under his excesses. As Bataille recounts, "after being tortured with a whip, she tried to move, with her tears and entreaties, a man both so pleasing and so evil; and as she invoked everything in the world that was saintly and touching, Sade, suddenly gone wild and hearing nothing, let out horrifying and perfectly nauseating screams" (VE 28). His tortures, however, were not limited to the blunt snap of the whip. Yet despite his multiple atrocities, feminists (some, at least) have often been hesitant to render him as anathema, though certainly Plato
would have excluded this pederast from the ideal polis for having corrupted (not only) the youth of his time.
Simone de Beauvoir, the grand matriarch of feminist theory, defended Sade's life and work against the wider context of the social milieu of his age. "Humaneness and benevolence" were vigorously attacked as "merely masks to disguise self-interest," as "mystifications which aimed at reconciling the irreconcilable: the unsatisfied appetites of the poor and the selfish greed of the rich" (Beauvoir 50). Acts of charity are but the cheap pacification of conscience. But Beauvoir would not call for "sympathy" for her subject, for that would in effect "betray" him (Beauvoir 61). However, even the avoidance of betrayal, as Beauvoir would have us do, suggests a humane treatment, something Sade himself would not have. As Nick Land has stated, "evil is never on trial" (Land 73). The question of guilt is a superfluity. The judge, jury, and audience are accomplices in criminality who have violently denied their complicity in helping to produce the aberrant defendent.
We live at a moment where we derive facile comfort in scapegoating the likes of Heidegger, de Man, Céline, and others for the inherent fascism in their thought, as well as their action. Foucault's recently documented sexual habits cause raised eyebrows; murmurings abound about reassessing the corpus of his work in light of these new developments. Several questions, however, must be posed. Does all of our own thinking gain its impetus from a central prevailing repugnance? Might a prevailing fascism be evident in the way all personality and thought are totalized, such that the dynamic character of both can never be seen in their particularity but only in the unity that serves the interests of condemnation? The obvious problem in the seemingly reasonable attempt to ostracize the sexually cruel, the Sadeian impulse, the masochistic tendency, the ostensibly darkest thoughts that human minds inhabit, by always associating such virulence with patriarchal values is, according to Carol Siegel, "to posit as the only possible opposing values those the nineteenth century associated with feminity, gentleness, and nurturance" (Siegel 10).
The writings of Kathy Acker complicate any effort to mark certain writing as pornographic only to exclude it. The category of the "pornologic" is more apropriate here as well. While describing herself as a feminist and writing decisively political novels, she nonetheless invokes the figure of Sade from her earliest work, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula to her most recent fiction, My Mother: Demonology. Her work is orgiastic, scatalogical, and even follows the initiative of her predecessor in malefaction in depicting incidents of sadism and masochism. She seems to want no truck with any "respectable feminism," whose motives arouse her suspicion. "I was shocked that this very respectable feminist wanted to have anything to do with me. That she knew who I was. What's her real politics?" (MMD 172).
Sade is less a hero for Acker than a co-conspirator in a revolution against the Law. "Prisons breed rats and rats live forever. We know that rats live forever from art rat examples such as de Sade...The reason that rats live forever is that they'll eat anything yet none eat them except for their cousins-by-language who're always playing" (MMD 187). Acker, the linguistic rat par excellence, devours her immortal precursors, the repulsive rodents of literary history, Sade, Genet, Bataille, etc., who perennially gnaw on the tattered edges of social malfeasance. That her work Blood and Guts in High School was banned by a Munich court in 1986, as potentially harmful to minors, establishes her "credentials" as a villain. Acker is evil, no doubt the most sublime compliment that one might tender. She conceives this evil as a form of alternative romance, a new understanding of the feminine:
(Mother thought that there must be romance other than romance. According to Elisabeth Roudinesco in her study of Lacan, around 1924 a conjuncture of early Feminism, a new wave of Freudianism, and Surrealism gave rise to a new representation of the female: nocturnal, dangerous, fragile and powerful. The rebellious, criminal, insane, or gay woman is no longer perceived as a slave to her symptoms. Instead, `in the negative idealism of crime {she} discovers the means to struggle against a society {that disgusts}.') (emphasis mine) (MMD 30).

The means to overcoming the strictures of moral society is through a nocturnal romantic transgression. The recontextualization of negation from the realm of the psychological to that of the social and political liberates feminine subjectivities from the "cure" imposed from the outside. It is this sense of negation that allies her work closely to that of Sade.
Acker transgresses the Law in more than the mere depiction of sexual excess. She eschews the law of description (moving away from Sade and Sacher-Masoch), preferring instead the flattening effects of narrative. She rants rather than paints, and more than anything, subverts the law of originality by consciously plagiarizing and appropriating from other texts. She argues, in the process, for the contextualization of meaning, textuality, and the vast potentiality of recontextualization as a conceptual method of writing, one that in itself was "stolen" from Juan Goytisolo (MMD 52). But while Acker cheats and steals, she does not lie, instead, admitting openly to her plagiarism. In the controversy surrounding her appropriation of four pages of material from a Harold Robbins novel for which she was accused of plagiarism, she denied the charge by freely admitting to having used the material (HL 12-13). Arthur Redding has demonstrated that Acker's incessant plagiarism is ultimately masochistic, a working out of the legacy of "failure" of that which is coopted, "an effort to see for oneself what lies on the far side of humiliation" (Redding 287, 289). She undermined the law of copyright by demonstrating that the meaning of any piece of writing can always be altered when it is recontextualized. The stasis of the Law is always in sharp contrast relative to the flux of conceptual movement and transformation in art and theory.
The means to overcome the stasis of the Law is through the destructive power of writing, the annhilation of all other writing. She writes, "such destruction leaves all that is essential intact. Resembling the processes of time, such destruction allows only the traces of death to persist" (MMD 123). The demons she incants in order to overwhelm the monkish spirits of (presumably George) Bush, her mother, and her father, who are themselves metaphorical of all preceding reactionary movements in thought, are the scintillating figures of Bataille and his lover who died tragically in November of 1938, Colette Peignot, better known by her pseudonym, Laure, the name attributed to the narrator of My Mother: Demonology. The notes and diaries written by Laure were published posthumously by Bataille and his colleague in the Parisian College of Sociology, Michel Leiris, in two volumes: Histoire d'une petite fille and Le Sacré. Acker apparently read these works for they inform much of her writing over the past ten years leading up to My Mother. Laure appears as a desired lover of the narrator in a section of Don Quixote and in a short fiction published by Acker in 1983 entitled "Translations of the Diaries of Laure the Schoolgirl," a clear appropriation of the collected diaries, fragments, and letters of Colette Peignot.
The opening sentence of this fiction recalls the earliest writings of Bataille: "No form cause I don't give a shit about anything anymore" (MMD 104). Bataille writes

in a very brief essay that what the word "formless," the title of the piece,
designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere...In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape...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 (VE 31).

That Acker's work transgresses the law of form does not suggest that her work lacks structure, for as we have seen, certain conceptual principles, including the texts she invokes, guide her narratives.
This shorter work by Acker on the diaries of Laure also recalls Bataille even more explicitly. The two letters included in the text are addressed to "Georges" and reveal Laure's mostly harsh feelings toward him, reflecting perhaps a feeling of resentment regarding his greater stature as a theoretician in France and her marginalization. Acker's fictional construct serves to reverse the canonical appropriation, to give credit to Laure's underacknowledged influence on Bataille, one he was all to willing too recognize. Laure's reactions to Georges are appropriate given Bataille's theories of love described in his essay "The Solar Anus" (VE 5-9). For Bataille, as well as Acker, love, like all aspects of the sacred, is implicated in the doublet of attraction and repulsion. However, as Acker points out, this notion of love is not the same as that of

"romantic love" (HL 24). Instead, the sources of love are highly abject or heterological.
An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality. An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love. A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobbing accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love (VE 6).

The point of these descriptions is to restore the experience of love to base matter, to the hairy, filthy repugnance of the genital organs, to the feces as waste, in short, to heterology. The wasting of matter, of energy, is the central principal of Bataille's concept of social organization, expenditure, to which productive accumulation is subordinated. In contrast to the notion of expenditure, the tradition of social theory had been founded, from Hegel and beyond, on work and production; Bataille, on the other hand, argued that societies are organized, more than anything else, by destruction and excess. What is longed for in such communities is a return to intimacy with a lost totality, the sacred (CS 23).
According to Hollier, the point of vacillation between attraction and repulsion is most significant, "precisely where attraction-repulsion as a pair break down and where repulsion becomes attractive, negativity positive, etc." (CS 103). This is the point of pure abjection. Acker is referring to this phenomenon when she says, "I'm being woken up when I'm feeling a combination of fear and pleasure" (HL 110). By returning the experience of birth to the realm of base matter, Acker is drawing our attention to the claim that Bataille makes about repulsion being central to the formation of human communities. "My mother tells me why I was born: she had a pain in her stomach....She runs to the toilet because she thinks she has to shit; I come out. The next day she has appendicitis" (HL 107).
For Bataille, the greatest calamity succeeding the disappearance of the sacred in modern civilizations is the "absence of need" for the sacred, more so than the "absence of the satisfaction of that need" (VE 13). He suggests that this condition derives from the requirements of instrumental reason and utility which turn humans into the slaves of production, which, as Acker notes, destroys desire. Modern society refuses to recognize base matter, the repulsive origin, which drives its organization. This point is apparent as well in Acker's remark: "SOCIETY'S PROGRESS TO TOTALITARIANISM AROSE AND KEEPS ARISING FROM ITS REFUSAL TO BE SHIT" (MMD 127). Totalized administration emanates from a sentiment of purification, an attempt to control all disparate elements that comprise a community. Acker is not always so starkly serious; she implicitly needles Bataille for only conceiving of the sacred as a state of "virility:" "Humans run away from their own shit, their ends, whereas I was now covered in mine: I had become twice a man" (MMD 127). Yet, her most scathing critique is reserved for the United States, a race of "degenerates" and "mongrels" that hates itself, its humanity, so much so that it has no alternative but to love a God who does not exist (MMD 20). Religion, as opposed to the sacred, is a moral "screen" that shields its supporters from real experience, from suffering as well as genuine pleasure.
Acker, in the voice of Laure, explicitly affirms her political and philosophical intimacy with Bataille when attending a monastery in the fifth section of My Mother: Demonology. She writes, "I explained to Bataille that this didn't mean that I was leaving him. Explained that I had no intention of abandoning him again" (MMD 149). The passage implies an estrangement alluded to earlier in the fictional letters "presumed" to have been translated by Acker. She imagines a complex and dynamic relationship between Laure and Bataille, the latter appearing to metamorphose briefly into Laure's father in one section of the text. None of Acker's characters, not surprisingly, have stable identities.
Laure's father, an artist, is attempting to paint New York, but in order to do so, to capture his experience of the city, he must find the ability to paint horror. Most of his attempts at doing so, however, are unsuccessful. He wishes to be able to translate an experience felt deeply within his own body onto canvas, but paradoxically his "perceptual habits" prevent him from truly "seeing" horror. On one occasion, Laure's father seems to reinforce the anomalous examples of abjection provided by Bataille: he takes a particular joy in viewing the charred bodies from a fire (MMD 108). The father seeks an experience of pure, unmediated repulsion, yet cannot access even the primal occasion of abjection. His experience of the fire is nothing other than attraction, in part because it is centered on sight. Vision is already a mechanism of distancing--by its very nature preventing an intimate engagement. For true sight to occur, it must be inscribed in the body. Her father's other obsessive fascination is painting images, representations, of women in sexual ecstasy. This combination of horror and eroticism allies him firmly with Bataille. But Acker seems to suggest that Bataille's encounter with the abject is not so much lived as thought. Laure is led to speculating on whether her father has a pure and inaccessible quality of evil, a quality that "may be related to the quality of artistry" (MMD 101). It is appropriate that she view "moral ambiguity" as the "color of horror" (MMD 8).
While many might be tempted to describe the writings of Acker and Bataille as politically subversive for feminism, such a position is highly suspect given the complexity and difficulty of political activity in the real world. Moreover, to describe these writers as such would be to turn them into instruments propping up the ideology of a countervailing force, returning them to the realm of utility. Bataille, himself, has noted this danger, that any "combat ideology" is a "necessary delusion" (CS 115). Ideological critique, while certainly important in a sense, doesn't cut deeply enough. The importance of Acker and Bataille lies in their ability to theorize and explicate the experience of the "heterogeneous," those marginal figures who occupy the periphery of any social organization as outcasts: madmen, murderers, masochists, etc., in short, those extremely marginalized figures who by their very existence remind us of our sense of lost intimacy with the sacred. Beyond theorizing the heterogeneous, Acker and Bataille return the experience of the "heterological" to a position of vital import. Heterology is the theory of the radically other; it registers the significance of the repulsion that would be expelled and excluded. This is not to say, as Hollier warned, that we "aestheticize the repugnant," but that repugnance has an aesthetic aspect not reducible to the notion of art, that is, to a normative notion of "aesthetic experience."
Disgust here is not a modality of aesthetic experience but a fundamental existential dimension. Reactions of repulsion do not have to be induced: They are what is given to start with. But rather than discharging them outside (rather than getting rid of them), one should think them. Heterology would be the theory of that which theory expels. In its battle with the angel of
repugnance, in the depths of darkness, thought faces the things that repel it (CS xix).

For Acker and Bataille, these encounters with the abject are pregnant with sociological consequences. Waste, the economy of expenditure, is the impulse which underlies ritualized activity in human communities. As Nick Land notes, the crimes of Sade and those of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth century pedophile, must be remembered as "crimes...of the world in which they are committed" (Land 72). Human communities must suppress human violence but their own complicity in such violence, the violence inherent in the structures of social organization, must be recognized lest paroxysms of rage perpetuate social disaster.