Deterritory

An interesting piece from the Irish Times on the WMD claims regarding Iraq and al Qaeda...

Scare stories about terrorist threat blown away

Evidence prosecution lawyers tried to link to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda
in trials of terrorist suspects has been shown to be false.

by Duncan Campbell

04/15/05 "The Irish Times" - - Colin Powell does not need more
humiliation over the manifold errors in his February 2003 presentation
to the United Nations. But on Wednesday a London jury brought down
another section of the case he made for war - that Iraq and Osama bin
Laden were supporting and directing terrorist poison cells throughout
Europe, including a London ricin ring.

Wednesday's verdicts on five defendants, and the dropping of charges
against four others, made it clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the
"ring" make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with
the British public. Until today, the public record for the past three
fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat
occupied by some of Wednesday's acquitted defendants. It was not.

The third plank of the al-Qaeda/Iraq poison theory was the link between
what Powell labelled the "UK poison cell" and training camps in
Afghanistan. The evidence the British government wanted to use to
connect the defendants to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda was never put to the
jury. That was because last autumn a trial within a trial was secretly
taking place. This was a private contest between a group of scientists
from the Porton Down military research centre and myself. The issue was:
where had the information on poisons and chemicals come from?

The information - five pages in Arabic, containing amateur instructions
for making ricin, cyanide and botulinum, and a list of chemicals used in
explosives - was at the heart of the case. The notes had been made by
Kamel Bourgass, the sole convicted defendant. His co-defendants believed
that he had copied the information from the internet. The prosecution
claimed that it had come from Afghanistan.

I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant
exploring Islamist websites which publish Bin Laden and his
sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on
how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the
gun lobby. The experience of being an expert witness on these issues has
made me feel a great deal safer on the streets of London. These were the
internal documents of the supposed al-Qaeda cell planning the "big one"
in Britain. But the recipes were untested and unoriginal, borrowed from
US sources. Moreover, ricin is not a weapon of mass destruction. It is a
poison which has only ever been used for one-on-one killings and
attempted killings.

It was the discovery of a copy of Bourgass's notes in Thetford in 2002
which inspired the wave of horror stories, and government announcements
and preparations for poison-gas attacks. It is true that when the team
from Porton Down entered the Wood Green flat in January 2003, their
field equipment registered the presence of ricin. But these were
high-sensitivity field detectors, for use where a false negative result
could be fatal.

A few days later, Dr Martin Pearce, head of the Biological Weapons
Identification Group, found that there was no ricin. However, when this
result was passed to London, the message reportedly said the opposite.

The planned government case on links to Afghanistan was based solely on
papers which a freelance journalist working for the Times had scooped up
after the US invasion of Kabul. Some were in Arabic, some in Russian.
They were far more detailed than Bourgass's notes. Nevertheless, claimed
Porton Down chemistry chief Dr Chris Timperley, they showed a "common
origin and progression" in the methods, thus linking the London group of
North Africans to Afghanistan and Bin Laden. The weakness of Dr
Timperley's case was that neither he nor the intelligence services had
examined any other documents which could have been the source. We were
told that Porton Down and its intelligence advisers had never previously
heard of the "Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, containing recipes for ricin
and much more". This document, written by veterans of the 1980s Afghan
war, has been on the internet since 1998.

All the information roads led west - not to Kabul, but to California and
the US midwest. The ricin recipes now seen on the internet were invented
20 years ago by survivalist Kurt Saxon, who advertises books and videos
on the internet.Before the ricin ring trial began, I called him in
Arizona. For $110, he sent me CDs and videos on bombs, missiles,
booby-traps - and ricin. We gave a copy of the ricin video to the
police. When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in
London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto,
California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaeda claims.

The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaeda manual"
into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had
been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to
produce in the 2001 New York trial relating to the first attack on the
World Trade Centre.

But it was not an al-Qaeda manual. The name was invented by the US
department of justice in 2001 and the contents were rushed on to the
internet to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney
general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act. To show that the
manual was written in the 1980s during the US-supported war against the
Soviet occupation was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct
translation from a 1988 US book - The Poisoner's Handbook by Maxwell
Hutchkinson.

We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that
Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do
so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an al-Qaeda-trained
super-terrorist. - (Guardian Service)

Duncan Campbell is an investigative writer and a scientific expert
witness on computers / telecommunications. He is author of "War Plan UK."

© The Irish Times

Unfortunately, I won't be able update or add to this blog because the Korean government has shut down all access to Blogspot in the immediate term. Apparently, one blogger posted a link to the video showing the beheading of Kim Sun-il. Since Kim's tragic death, all IP addresses showing the video have been blocked by the Korean government. This goes as well for the Information Clearinghouse website.

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; “I” am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me—an other than I who passively become other—Maurice Blanchot

Perhaps few other countries can magnify the sicknesses of the twentieth century and the adjoining self-deceptions of human “progress” better than Cambodia, a country that truly defies description and ranks perhaps with India as among the most intense experiences available to someone suitably sensitive to the struggles and hardships endured by those who dwell in what Alphonso Lingis has called the “outer zone,” the space surrounding a nucleic “archipelago,” where industrial power is centralized. Cambodia is “the” post-genocidal culture par excellence (admitting all the attending, horrid ironies that go with the term). It is at once a beautiful, idyllic and quiet land and an absurd, macabre carnivalization of its own history, an “accursed share” of the globe, a horrible aggregation of the effects of “virulent expenditure,” a term designating the broad range of excesses said to undergird the formation and cohesion of any social organization. Cambodia is a country that has undergone a collective dismemberment as evidence of the monstrous visage of capital and the murderous utopian fantasies of its previous leadership. It is a country that demands gazes, has limitless exigencies, and is literally selling itself away for whatever sustenance or financial advantage it can attain. It’s a country with few enforceable laws that can readily be broken, pending the whims of current authority; capital crimes can accordingly take place almost with impunity. What does an agrarian utopian illusion look like twenty years after it was instituted, after as much as thirty percent of its population was exterminated or starved to death? Go to Cambodia and see. Though an unfair, undeserved caricature, it would indeed be revealing to describe the country as one where all too many of the able-bodied men are cyclo and moto taxi drivers, where prostitution is rampant, despite the government’s closing of the brothels (a “sex industry” rapidly surpassing that of its neighbor, Thailand, especially in terms of pedophilia). Sadly, it is also a surreal Bunuelesque theatre of dismembered bodies, hunched-over, malnourished elderly, who were apparently “fortunate” in surviving the post-Khmer Rouge famine, and bony, ragged children circulating among visitors and urgently pressing for food or funds. And if this weren’t enough, it has a tourism “industry” touting the sorriest episode in its long history as one of its principal “attractions,” the world’s largest charnel house of despair. And who can blame a country which has suffered as much as this one for doing so?
It’s a country of living spectres, visibly wrecked from its ordeal, the psychological imprints of the effects inscribed in their very faces, who see life as little more than scrounging and hustling for basic necessities, and yet a country still possessing many charms and a morbidly incongruous but all too apparent innocence, where the people can still be the friendliest imaginable. The simultaneous presence of such inconsistency can readily evoke a madness of its own. Ultimately, one cannot but feel a deep well of empathy, compassion, and commiseration for Cambodia, for its resilience as much as for its “humanity,” no matter how alien and unfathomable its ordeal. In a year marking the twentieth anniversary of the demise of the Khmer Rouge, the dissolution of its remaining stronghold in Anlong Veng, the surrender of its ideological leadership in the figures of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, the capture of the one-legged general Ta Mok, known as “The Butcher” and the coordinator of its internal purges, and the one year anniversary of the death of Pol Pot, Cambodia is worth remembering, worth recognizing. But this significant year should not be commemorated simply for our fetishist obsessions with monsters and horror, with the ungraspable chimera that haunted the place for just under four years, which keep the newsmakers working overtime satisfying our curiosity, keeping this entire story from becoming the mere trivia that events in the Third World tend to become. Nor should it serve as yet another comforting, self-satisfying example of the “disaster” of a communism that truly has never been realized, no matter the assignation of signifiers. It will doubtless surprise no one that Cambodians are real people worthy of understanding, but this realization will scarcely be “sensed,” for no matter how “virtuous” we imagine ourselves to be, we, the consumers of information in the first world, are hardly capable of rendering these people as much more than far-removed abstractions during the normal conduct of our everyday business. Cambodia ever so gradually recovers, despite the relative indifference of the “enlightened.”
Prior to the twentieth century, genocide was primarily an instrument of colonization. It was an almost total, primarily cultural extermination, motivated principally by a powerful sense of fear and incomprehensibility in the face of the other, as well as a legitimating practice for the acquisition of wealth, a means of countering the theological-ethical supposition that what was really going on was “theft.” In the twentieth century, genocide has proliferated and multiplied. It has mostly been geographically localized, partial and not total, not necessarily directed at an “other” found to be incomprehensible, but often at one familiar and despised. But while the motivations of colonial genocide were usually greed, concealed by religious and paternal justifications, the modern form all too often violates principles of rational acquisition, in fact, destroying the very foundations of wealth itself, namely labor. During genocide, no thought ever seems to be given to the maintenance of despised and yet well-oiled “human machines,” bodies that plant rice, dig irrigation canals, nurture livestock, in short, that are capable of working and generating capital. Thus, the inspiration for genocide is very alien from rational motivations of utility, even while the machinery employed is typically rational and instrumental. And yet modern genocide has, paradoxically, developed and proliferated concurrently with the development of capitalism, with the highest forms of instrumental rationality, and has become most virulent in the latest stages of capitalism. Genocide is the spectacular manifestation of the dark “underbelly” of “progress” in the rational, material sense. It is the testament for enlightenment “success.” This is why it has prevailed so dramatically and yet is so radically incomprehensible. Genocide is the “other,” the radically “incomprehensible,” of a modernity during a moment in history where all terrain has now been traversed and “nothing” is “new” any longer, those tropes of a postmodern milieu where the impetus for “discovery” has been completely “exhausted.” With its origins located in the first movements of the transcontinental voyage, it now reaches its pinnacle during a globalized information age where no turf remains to be pioneered. In its modern form, it exceeds the “restricted” research project (of which the Cambodian Genocide Program is a primary example) of charting its movement in order to assign blame, set up a tribunal, and indict executioners. These “restricted” research projects, though indispensable, do not go far enough in explaining the general problem of genocide. They seek a rational solution for a problem that far exceeds reason itself.
Perhaps the most significant achievement of the French philosopher Georges Bataille was the recognition that a world system dedicated to the massive, rational production and accumulation of capital required in equal measure avenues for the expedient release of “irrational” forces, the surplus of energy created in production and requiring an outlet. The alternative is the emergence of these forces in far more destructive and virulent forms, as the modern history of genocide can attest. A theory of genocide must therefore be two-fold: an “internal” account of the “restricted” modalities of loss, something that the CGP, sponsored by Yale University, has done well to provide; but also an “external” account of the “general economy” of genocide, within the context of the history and manifestations of expenditure more generally and within the political amplifications of the global movements of capital. Thus, a “theory” as well as an account of “particularities” is necessary. A theory of genocide will need to become one in which the specific catalysts within particular geographies are used to explain the larger global movements of destruction generated from capitalist exploitation and inequality. Thus, the terrible irony of the Khmer Rouge is that in its puritanical effort to eradicate all vestiges of capital from daily life in Cambodia, the malevolent deeds it undertook served, unwittingly, as the most exemplary effects of uncurtailed capital movement itself. The tragedy of Cambodia lies in a world-system that perpetually refuses to recognize the forces of expenditure that, along with those of production, undergird the activities and movements of human societies.
One of the lamentable aspects of the Cambodian genocide is that it cannot be spoken about without a reference to Auschwitz, as if the Cambodian predicament should be the occasion to address the horrors of Auschwitz all over again. The comparisons are inevitable but unfortunate. Indeed, as Ben Kiernan and others have noted, racism was a prominent feature of the Pol Pot regime, and certainly vast numbers of Vietnamese, Cham, Chinese and various other ethnic tribal groups were killed. But because so many of the victims were not ethnically differentiated from their executioners, one must recognize that the comparison finally breaks down. While the Holocaust need not be restricted to being simply a “Jewish” problem, nor the Cambodian genocide limited to being a “Khmer” dilemma, it is really only the quality of the horror and the sheer gargantuan numbers that these two events have in common.
Such comparisons reveal something else, however. Mainly, one can note how much the genocide of one accursed ethnic grouping in a culturally proximate location tends to dominate public consciousness in the west and how the media work to preserve this consciousness. What is less apparent is how this concentration of attention, important though it is, often works to elide other instances, particularly present cases. A Schindler’s List unwittingly serves to obfuscate the brutality in Rwanda, even while both “events” are contemporaneous. Pol Pot becomes a useful monster to obfiscate for western powers the even more self-incriminating and embarrassing instance of East Timor. And Bosnia and now Kosovo obscure everything else, because they serve as a stark reminder of Auschwitz, itself, because the ethnic cleansing that took place was directly rooted to events of World War II (in the case of Bosnia), and because the people affected were geographically and culturally proximate to western societies, even if ethnically and religiously differentiated. The Bosnian genocide also dominates public consciousness in part due to a sense of responsibility not undertaken. It was a tragedy that, if not for political errors and miscalculations by Europe and the United States, could have been prevented. The same could be said about Rwanda, though it did not dominate public consciousness to the same degree, perhaps due to the lack of ethnic and geographic proximity previously mentioned or to racism and other more sinister explanations. It should be noted that Rwanda certainly was not publicized to the same degree as Bosnia in such journals having large audiences among the highly educated, literate public as New York Review of Books.
After genocide, the problem of the remnants and their uses remains. As we have seen with the possible international tribunal of Khmer Rouge cadres, genocides can be recalled to galvanize public paranoia, consolidate dictatorial power, justify and legitimate diplomatic whitewashes, etc. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted a decade ago about the Holocaust, “the Jewish state tried to employ the tragic memories as the certificate of its political legitimacy, a safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and above all as the advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit.” Thus, the dangers regarding the political use of remnants from the archives of genocide have always been immanent to memory itself.
Furthermore, due to the writing of history and the authors who carry it out, pre-twentieth century genocide is largely unrecorded and rarely acknowledged. When the attempt is made to recognize it and remember the affected peoples in the space of a museum, as the Smithsonian did a few years ago, it is by and large dubbed by the general public as “politically correct” and, therefore, a contentious subject worthy of derision. Such refusal truly is the hallmark of a totalitarian state, one that can chime along with the platitudes about Holocaust memory, while ignoring its complicity and responsibility in other instances, such as in the case of the native peoples of the United States or even the egregious example of Rwanda. Hence, an implicit tension between remembering, forgetting, perceiving, and according recognition is inherent to the problem of genocide and its aftermath.
In these past two years of elegies about Pol Pot’s victims, marking the death of Pol Pot and the final demise of the Khmer Rouge, it is striking how little is remembered about the more than half a million Cambodians killed by U.S. air attacks during the illegal covert war carried out in the country during the early 1970s. It is intriguing to watch the political maneuvering for an international trial of the former central committee members by a country whose bombs helped turn a rag-tag army, sequestered in the jungles of northern Cambodia, into a force strong enough to topple the American-backed government of Lon Nol in Phnom Penh. Nothing is mentioned of this in the memorials to Pol Pot’s victims carried in the large exposes in such journals as Time, Newsweek, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. Little is mentioned of the fact that when Pol Pot’s regime was ousted in 1979 and retreated to the Thai border, it was kept afloat by American and Chinese aid. It has not even been noted that the Khmer Rouge was granted political legitimacy to contest the United Nations sponsored elections in 1993. As an oppositional movement with power, one despising Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge were worthy of political and military support, an irony in these days when human rights abuses in Myanmar and China are so easily condemned by western powers. Once the Khmer Rouge lost power and their ranks fragmented, they became a subject of genocidal research, a political effort to correct the wrongs of history. All of this is forgotten. It’s forgotten how Pol Pot’s paranoia about CIA infiltration and Vietnamese intervention was psychologically coextensive with American paranoia about dominoes during the Cold War.
What has not yet been forgotten is the archive. As with the Holocaust memorials in Washington, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, Cambodia has its own museums of memory. There’s the stupa of skulls at the killing fields in Choeung Ek, near Phnom Penh, and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the capital city itself. These comprise the principal records of atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. These are the stores of memory as well as the archives of an “aesthetic” value, not in the sense of “art,” but rather in an affectation of the senses, a powerful capacity to overwhelm the viewer. These archives of memory have already had their impact on a large contingent of visitors. Already in the past two years the Museum of Modern Art in New York has organized an exhibition based on the photographs at Tuol Sleng (May 15-September 30, 1997). Similarly, one can find an immense proliferation of virtual archives of these images on a number of internet websites. Such attempts to disseminate these powerful images, to develop a wider understanding and awareness of Cambodia’s unique horror, are necessary and commendable. They serve to impart a sense of the experience of witnessing the photographs, the skulls, and the clothing firsthand. But in their sanitized display in a modern, air conditioned museum capable of transmitting the experience of the “abject” in only a clean, purified manner, they lack the particularly indispensable aspects of textuality: human encounters, the tastes and scents of the markets, of roasted fish on burning pieces of charcoal, of smoke from locally produced cigarettes, of dust blowing in the countryside. The display becomes something other than Cambodian; whereas, bearing witness in Cambodia is three dimensional, not in the sense of “authenticity,” but rather in the sense of a more full-fledged comprehension of the events that took place and the people that were affected. The mediated archives of the virtual space or the pristine decor of MOMA can be nothing other than wholly incomplete and perhaps misleading. For western viewers to understand and empathize with Cambodians, there can be no virtual surrogate. It is equally troubling that the photographers who prepared the prints for viewing have obtained international copyrights for the figures displayed, as if these faces could be owned by anyone other than relatives of the victims or the country that defined their identities and in which their extermination took place, as if their deaths could possibly be used for any form of commercial gain, turned back into capital once again.
Nevertheless, the reaction of viewers to the exhibition at MOMA ranged from the predictable to the intriguing, and finally to disturbing. Some viewers questioned the appropriateness of exhibiting such photographs at an “art” museum, photographs that could not purport any sort of artistic intent (presumably). Since the prints at MOMA were derived from negatives accidentally discovered on the site of the museum in a file cabinet by two American photographers, Doug Niven and Christopher Riley, then this reservation raises the question, in the first place, as to whether the production of prints from the negatives of others (in this case, the Khmer Rouge photographer Nhem Ein, who took them in his teens) can or should be viewed as “artistic.” Secondly, one must address the question of whether photographs taken without artistic intent or qualifications can still have artistic merit. Additionally, since there can be no denying the powerful “aesthetic” effects produced by the photographs, then should a museum such as MOMA be viewed only as an archive of “art” or one of “aesthetics” more generally, that is, one congruent with the particular uncertainties of modernity? Finally, should the entire question of artistic merit be superseded by the issue of the exigencies of the Cambodian holocaust, by the troubling recent events in the country, including the death of Pol Pot, and the proximity in history of the disaster evidenced in the photographs? In other words, if viewing in a museum devoted to modern art is solely the domain of assessing, determining, and judging artistic merit, then exactly what sort of diversionary pleasures can we truly be entitled to if we are motivated to insulate ourselves from the salient horrors of modernity, which are the subject of much “art” and for which we might even bear some degree of responsibility or have received some level of benefit? And could art be little more than a parochial, “diversionary pleasure” if it fails to confront the dilemmas of modernity outside the parameters of artistic intent? On the other hand, if the reactions in viewing such photographs are merely those of titillation, exemplified perhaps in the souvenir t-shirts of the museum sold in Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh, even more troubling questions about “viewing” would need to be addressed.
The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide is located on the grounds of the former Tuol Svay Prey High School on 113th Street in southern Phnom Penh between 322nd and 352nd Streets. The school was transformed into Security Prison 21 (S-21) during the Pol Pot regime. Over 14,000 people, many of them Khmer Rouge cadres who had been purged, were detained and tortured on the premises. If they managed to survive the torture at S-21, they were later executed at the killing fields in Choeung Ek, southwest of Phnom Penh, in grisly episodes of bludgeoning. Only seven people survived after incarceration at S-21. The irony of a high school deployed as a torture center is perhaps all too obvious, but is also compounded by the fact that the director of the center, Khaing Khek Iev, alias Deuch, had been a former deputy school principal of Balaing College in Kompong Thom. His chief interrogator, Mam Nay, alias Chan, a former student of central committee cadre Son Sen, the ultimate overseer of the detention center, had been the principal of Balaing College at the same time as Deuch. They left over 100,000 pages of documents, including “confessions,” when they were driven from the capital during the Vietnamese invasion in January 1979. It was the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese-installed regime in Phnom Penh, led by defectors from the Eastern Zone of the Khmer Rouge, Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, who created Tuol Sleng from the documents and thousands of photographs of victims left behind. Now a government sponsored record of genocide, it has been used as a political propaganda piece to be sure, one readily serving the interests of current prime minister Hun Sen, but it is also an archive that exceeds the sometimes questionable interests to which it often has been wedded. As any visitor will verify, the horrors of Tuol Sleng stand quite well on their own.
The debates surrounding the MOMA exhibit are finally compelling in that the Tuol Sleng Museum, itself, is ultimately an archive lacking in artistic complexity. The display honors no principles of preservation, no particular techniques of museum arrangement. What is on display is a mere gargantuan aesthetic, where the sheer numbers of images and where the artifacts themselves tell the story of an improbable, unfathomable terror. It is the conditions of the archives, the banality of the display, of the features of the rooms and the grounds, the instruments of torture that remain, the clothes of the victims, the slipshod construction of the detention chambers, the fact that the events of terror depicted in the museum once occupied the same geographic space, and the “ghosts” that remain on the premises that provide an aura unparalleled outside of perhaps Auschwitz. It is the incongruity of seeing pull-up bars and benches once used by school children on the outside of buildings that house elaborate instruments of water torture and cages that once held scolopendra and scorpions. It is the presence of children from neighboring homes, seemingly oblivious to the horror of the images contained in the buildings, circulating through the grounds and the rooms while viewers pass through. It is an unforgettable archive but one that must finally be forgotten because of the manner in which the artifacts are being preserved and maintained (the archaeo-empirical question) and because of the “politics of memory” (the ethical dilemma of elision). Tuol Sleng is ultimately an impermanent construction, a fact that need not be disappointing.
The museum is composed of four buildings, each depicting different aspects of the horrors committed in the former detention center. All of the buildings are of the same approximate size, and the paint that once covered them is largely fading away. When coupled with the large accumulation of razor wire (see photograph A-2), which covers the space above the exterior wall parallel to 113th Street, the approach to the complex is ominous and eerie. The remains of dried coconut shells and garbage dot the deteriorated and pock-marked approach on 334th Street. The ample green fronds of coconut palms extend in all directions and the street is blessed with one of the few street lamps in all of Phnom Penh.
Building A is the southernmost building and faces north. It contains ten rooms on the first floor and five on the second and third. The top two floors and the last two rooms on the first floor, however, are blocked off. This building was deployed for jailing, interrogating, and torturing high officials, presumably of the Khmer Rouge, during its notorious internal purges. The eight rooms available for viewing each contain a photograph of one of the remaining 14 victims discovered by the Vietnamese in their conquest of Phnom Penh in January 1979 (see photographs A-5 and A-6). The photographs are large, rough, and unclear and are tacked to the walls of the rooms. Each room contains the rough metal skeleton of a bed and up to five reinforcing steel hooks cemented to the floor, which were used for leg shackles (see photograph A-4). Some of the beds have a pillow, a small mat, chains, locks, and a decaying steel box previously used for human waste. The floors are composed of alternating beige and white tiles with other varieties haphazardly mixed in. The seventh cell has an old shirt from one of the victims, while others have cups and plastic jugs. Inexplicably, the photo in the eighth cell faces east, while the other seven face west. This photograph is particularly grisly—an intact but clearly tortured body with the head reduced to a skull (A-6). In the picture, one shovel lies on the floor and another on the bed. Noting as well the paintings of torture scenes made by former victims that appear in Building D, one might assume torture had been carried out with acid. The stairwells at either end of the building are completely soiled, riddled with cobwebs and garbage, with no effort made toward maintenance. All the windows in the cells are barred.
Outside and parallel to Building A is the grave memorial to the 14 victims found on the site in 1979 (see photograph A-3). These are grouped into separate rows of eight and six, and the headstones are all painted white, as are the bases of the palms on the grounds of the museum, a typical Vietnamese custom for making the trees visible at night.
At the west end and perpendicular to Building A is Building B, which faces east toward the entrance of the museum. Its top two floors are closed off and pull-up bars and benches line the front. This building had been previously used for mass detention of prisoners. The first, southernmost room contains large photographs of mostly important officials and cadres as well as foreigners, including one of New York Times correspondent and author of The Killing Fields, Sydney Schanberg, who was once detained by Khmer Rouge soldiers at the former Chruoy Changvar Bridge. At the southern wall is a huge glass case containing the dull, gray uniforms once worn by the prisoners (see photograph B-1). One can also see several photos of the fences and razor wire on the S-21 grounds. On my first visit to the museum, this room had the tattered, weathered “confession” of a 19-year-old Frenchman, M. Bernard, who was apparently detained and killed by the Khmer Rouge in April 1976, tacked to the west wall (see photograph B-2). On my second visit, the confession had been removed. The second room is much smaller and its walls bear 41 sets of mug shots grouped in frames of 36 for a total of 1436. A total of 2872 eyes in various modalities of expression, but mostly of incomprehension or terror, fix their gaze on the viewer who gazes at them, a Kafka-esque interrogation of faces already determined as guilty, as criminal, and now marshaled out of existence, out of history at the death camps by a maniacal band of grim reapers. These stares from all directions and all corners are extremely disconcerting, a perverted panopticon of a kind not described by Michel Foucault—instead of the “many” being viewed simultaneously by the “one,” we have the “one,” ourselves, being viewed by the “totality,” not of the controllers but of the “exterminated.” The genocide and its victims seem to gape at us, while in fact they are glaring at their executioners. These photographs and all the mug shots to follow were taken by the Khmer Rouge prison authorities, demonstrably meticulous archivists, and were found on the premises when the Vietnamese arrived in the capital. It is this aspect of scrupulous documentation that the S-21 authorities shared with the administrators of the Holocaust in Europe. The bureaucratic administration of murder on a grand scale is the means by which moral indifference and invisibility are produced and rationally justified, according to Bauman. Genocide, therefore, is very much a part of the “civilizing” process, an outgrowth of instrumental rationality that is incapable of being differentiated from that process, an observation that must strike one as counterintuitive.
Further along is the much larger third room, containing six huge panels of photographs of men only, including some monks, each wearing the ubiquitous numbered tags, a total of 1878 in all (see photographs B-3—B-9). Cemented to the floor of the room are an additional twenty rebar rods with curved ends, used as hooks used for leg-detention shackles(B-3). The fourth room also contains six large panels of mug shots, including 1523 men and 490 women (see photographs B-10 and B-11). Some of the photos in these larger rooms have been torn off the panels, souvenirs perhaps for visitors, while others are peeling away. Many of them are darkening and fading from external sunlight and other elements, the very elements that once and still tear apart the laterite blocks at Angkor. The fifth room comprises two busts and two bust making molds of Pol Pot, numerous leg hooks, shackles, and reinforced steel rods on a lecture stage. Twenty enlarged photographs of the “killing fields,” the huge mass graves, line the northern and southern walls of the room. The east wall contains 110 hideous photographs of victims after torture (see photographs B-13 and B-14). Again, as with Building A, the stairwells and adjoining rooms in Building B are littered with dirt, cobwebs, leaves, and trash (see photograph B-12 for a representative example). Small holes in the poured concrete walls allow in bits of light, providing a sense of the horrid conditions of confinement. Altogether, a total of 5437 faces adorn the walls of Building B. A veritable conspiracy of gazes confronts the viewer, but one that induces empathy and elicits compassion as much as it effects a disturbing state of vertiginous agitation in the viewer. We are met head on by a seemingly infinite number of faces, faces which, as Emmanuel Levinas theorized, are but the “incisions made in time that do not bleed.” And yet these are the faces that have bled, that have been denuded of flesh. The face is indeed the “incision” on time and, therefore, the “ghost” that remains. What is abstract, though, is the “skull.” It is the skull that totalizes and finally reduces the face to a core essence, one that cannot readily be differentiated from any other. The horror in Building B is one of denudation, the perdition of the flesh, of watching the tissue melt away leaving only the vacant, hollow crevices of bone, leaving only the “undifferentiated.” The gradual deterioration of the photographs that fade and peel from the panels is a metaphor for the other form of denudation, impermanence standing in the place of death and erasure, beings that have been driven out of existence and can now only be remembered in the context of the abominations that were wrecked upon them.
Building C was also a mass detention center but is distinct from Building B in that it contains 115 makeshift cells, an uncanny reminder of the historical proximity of the events that took place here. The first floor is composed of five rooms with eleven offhandedly produced brick cells with barely enough room to hold one person (see photograph C-3). Chains are cemented to the floors in many of the cells and some steel leg shackles can be found (see photograph C-4). Slipshod cutaways have been made through the masonry walls between the rooms, providing the effect of a partial panopticon from either end of the building. The second floor contains five sets of twelve wooden detention cells, including a shower room, with the scent of its prior use still lingering, remarkably, in the wood (see photographs C-5 and C-6). A scupper is carved out of the base of the wall to serve as a drain. The third floor is comprised of five mass detention rooms, each lined with numbers for organizing the prisoners against the walls. The columns along the main corridors at the front of the building are sealed with barbed wire to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide (see photograph C-2).
Passing through Building C is almost equivalent to reliving the experience of incarceration under Pol Pot. As one moves between the cells, through the inside corridor separated from the outside world by the formidable imposition of barbed wire, a powerful sense isolation, containment and despair emerges. The slovenly construction of the masonry partitions, which do not even approach the ceilings of the rooms and whose tops are caked with mortar, suggesting gestures of incompleteness or incompetence, metonymically merges with recollections of the dreary banality of contemporary makeshift architecture in the urban squalor of many major Third World cities and western ghettoes, a representation of modern forms and strategies of human immurement. Accordingly, Building C might be one of the most profoundly depressing sets of images that one can conceive, an unparalleled anti-aesthetic and unwitting fusion of Third World minimalist necessity, an abominable one to be certain, and a flat, barren First World sensibility all too willing to ignore, abet or apathetically detach from the conditions which produce monstrosities like the Khmer Rouge phenomenon.
The last of the visual records of the Tuol Sleng museum are contained in Building D, which is in the northern part of the grounds facing south. Building D is basically a summation of the Khmer Rouge period in general. Among the archives are photographs of Phnom Penh after April 1975, photographs of the S-21 leadership, interrogators, and even cooks, artistic renderings by one of the seven survivors, Heng Nath, of Khmer Rouge atrocities, and various technologies of torture. One can notice the photos of “Deuch” and Mam Nay in the first room, as well as a large photograph of one of the seven confessions of Hu Nim next to his snapshot. Hu Nim had been Information Minister under Pol Pot and was arrested on April 10, 1977 and killed almost two months later on July 6 for criticizing the party center’s handling of the peasants, suggesting the reintroduction of money as a work incentive, and ideologically supporting China’s Cultural Revolution. Additionally, the room holds a chair equipped with a vice-like mechanism that bores an iron bit into the back of the head of a victim during an interrogation (see photograph D-2). Photos of Phnom Penh after the evacuation are located on a number of the walls, as are photos of victims after the famine that followed the overthrow of Pol Pot.
The second room holds numerous instruments of torture, particularly whips but also bars, shovels, hoes, an axe, a knotted cane, leg shackles, etc. Included in this room are eight paintings of torture scenes by Heng Nath (see photographs D-4 and D-5). The third room has four more paintings of torture as well as photographs of famous Cambodians, including entertainers, who were killed. A few photographs are of clocks and lamps collected by the Khmer Rouge, as well as an infamous one of life in the countryside under Pol Pot. The room also has cages used for scolopendra and scorpions (see photograph D-3), as well as the huge wooden contraptions used for submersion and suffocation in water. The fourth room possesses enlarged photographs of deserted cities, shelled-out buildings, empty factories, as well as a map of an alleged 6186 incursions into Vietnam in an outrageous and ultimately suicidal effort to retake Kampuchea Krom, the area now known as the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam, precipitating the invasion that ended the Khmer Rouge. The room also contains numerous photos of destroyed temples, depicting Pol Pot’s concerted effort to wipe out Buddhism, and others of skulls and bones collected from the mass graves (see photograph D-1). Finally, in the fifth room are four additional paintings of torture scenes, one large wall panel photograph of the killing fields, two photographs of Phnom Penh after evacuation, and the mammoth map of Cambodia made from skulls and bones, with the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers delineated in red (see photograph D-6). A final tabulation of the Khmer Rouge achievement can be found on either side of the gruesome map in both French and Khmer: 3,314,768 killings (by murder, starvation or disease) and disappearances (according to Vietnamese estimates); 141,868 invalids; 200,000 orphans; 635,522 destroyed houses; 5857 demolished schools; 796 hospitals, infirmaries, and laboratories obliterated; 1968 Buddhist pagodas and 144 Islamic mosques destroyed; and 1,507,416 livestock animals killed. According to Ben Kiernan and the Cambodia Genocide Program at Yale University, the number of those who perished was 1.671 million. Recent satellite map surveys by Australia have indicated numbers of over two million with the discovery of over a thousand previously unknown mass graves.
Georges Bataille coined the term “informe” in order to describe phenomena that eluded the grasp of philosophers and that evaded the appropriating efforts of knowledge in general. He states that what the informe “designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.” In academia, the informe is that which escapes explanation; it eludes an appropriating discourse. The informe is the experience which does not make “sense,” the experience we are unable to make “sense” of, or are unable to “sense,” to comprehend. According to Bataille, for academics to be satisfied, “the universe would have to take shape.” But the informe is that which will not fit conveniently into prefabricated models. In comparison to Bataille’s account, Bauman has argued that genocide is precisely the phenomenon that sociologists have been completely inadequate to explain, in good part because the models deployed have been oriented too greatly to rational explanations: “sociology has been engaged since its birth in a mimetic relationship with its object—or, rather, with the imagery of that object which it constructed and accepted as the frame for its own discourse.” Thus, he concludes that it is a task of the Holocaust to educate sociology, not for sociology to explain the Holocaust. “Like it or not, Auschwitz expands the universe of consciousness no less than landing on the moon.” But it is this awareness that has yet to intervene into sociological practice and divest it from its commitments to the legitimizing discourses of instrumental rationality, of applying “mathematical frock coats to what is,” as Bataille phrases it. The methods and processes of the production of academic knowledge imitate the forces of our episteme, the very forces that create the conditions of genocide, the rational modes of production and accumulation of capital and the hoarding of energies expended during the process. The same rational bureaucratic processes are evident in the administration of the Holocaust, as well as in the documentation and maintenance of the S-21 prison under
Pol Pot. As Bauman notes, “the civilizing process is, among other things, a process of divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus, and of emancipating the desiderata of rationality from interference of ethical norms or moral inhibitions.” It is the development of military apparatuses in modernity that illustrates this divorce of violence from ethical consideration, that ushers in the new ethos of a rational comprehensibility to the brutality carried out by these actors—-a stark contrast, in the case of genocide, to the irrationality of the impetus behind the deeds themselves. This then is one of the paradoxes of genocide as much as one of its tropes: instrumental reason deployed in the service of an abominable, irrational, incomprehensible action. This ethos of modernity is that of the distantiated and it defines our relationships with Third World societies as much as explains the instrumental social engineering of violence. It elucidates, as well, the paradigmatic methods of the human sciences in western academic practices, that is to say, those of verificationism and scientism.
The upshot, then, is that modern genocide is not an aberration of modernity, as if we were moving backward from “societies of control” and the “micro-physics of disciplinary power,” described by Foucault and into horrifying regimes of torture, like drawing and quartering, as if we could comfortably dismiss brutality in the Third World as simply a regression of modernity befitting its economic realities. As Foucault argued, the newer forms of discipline are far more insidious, even while less spectacular. While the experience of Tuol Sleng might be frightening from the standpoint of an experience of such a return, a restoration of the conditions of pre-nineteenth century brutality, we cannot be reassured when examining the rationalized forms of violence of modernity. The Cambodian genocide, like all other modern forms, must be seen as coextensive with the forces and movements of modernity, not as inevitable but as possible, potential, and actual.
The question, then, apropos Bauman, is not what the human sciences can tell us about the Cambodian genocide and Tuol Sleng as its archival representation. The question must be what can the Cambodian genocide and all other modern examples tell us about the human sciences. We have already been alerted to the fact that the rationalizing and distancing practices of intellectual life coextend with the rational procedures of the bureaucratic administration of genocide in terms of the Holocaust, as well as the procedures that prevailed at S-21. But is this all that Tuol Sleng can teach the human sciences?
Perhaps more than anything, Tuol Sleng instructs those who would listen that contemporary intellectual life, diverted as it usually is to improvident, disciplinary-centric, self-referential, sectarian or internecine debates and problematics, is largely inept, inattentive, or apathetic regarding the darker, more severe exigencies of modernity. And this all takes place as contemporary academia moves ever further to the left, toward positions where cultural and intellectual capital could be more appropriately invested. Modern intellectual work, despite its impact in the universities, has been “disciplined” into quietude outside. Academics become ever more resigned to being under “house arrest,” their urgencies becoming ever more localized, provincial, and careerist. As we while away the hours at our word processors producing knowledge to justify our careers, forty thousand children die every day in the “fetid slums of Third World cities, an Auschwitz every three months.” Do we need, therefore, to be reminded of the Holocaust so that it never happens
again, when in fact it goes on in one form or another, on the level of disaster if not of deed, all the time? As we employ the academic techniques of “disinterestedness,” “objectivity,” and “neutrality,” or just the ordinary discourses that deactivate our “senses” from the capacities to feel, empathize, or even become aware of the conditions endured by those who inhabit the “outer zone,” a distantiated form of life is produced, an elixir of annulment is imbibed, our bodies are tranquilized out of a capacity for affectation. Our discourses compel us to somnolence.
If, as Bauman wrote, Auschwitz expands human consciousness as much as space travel has done, then Tuol Sleng and the Cambodian genocide should have managed to perform the same operation. This could have been done by a provocation of anger as well as one of horror. Anger is that mark of subjectivity largely demanded to be liquidated from an “impartial,” unpartisan academic discourse. If academia has something to “learn” from the experience of Tuol Sleng, from the modern problem of genocide, and not simply something to “teach” about this problem, then the current manner in which intellectual work is undertaken will have to change. If critical theorists of the left and the vanguard in cultural studies are to avoid becoming intellectually as well as
politically marginalized from the dilemmas of modernity, insulated in debates about mediated forms of cultural representation, then the problems of the Third World must begin to inhabit our discourses, our conferences, our symposia, and our classes to a greater extent than they have until now. These problems must be spoken about in the same breath as one that discusses the great artists, thinkers and theorists one admires. It’s not enough anymore for one to plead being structurally “ineffectual” when confronted with modern horror. Nevertheless, such a synthesis of intellectual and political commitment will not in itself prevent further genocides nor eliminate the horrific conditions of daily life in the Third World anymore than it will guarantee an educated populace committed to these ends. Obviously, there are no assurances. But “anger,” once it is reinvested and reactivated in our collective academic “senses,” is clearly a better alternative than ineffectual passivity or an isolated absorption into arcane acrobatics. A new radical empiricism should emerge from the phenomenon of genocide. As Jean-Luc Nancy noted, “anger is the political sentiment par excellence. Anger concerns the inadmissible, the intolerable, and a refusal, a resistance that casts itself from the first beyond all it can reasonable accomplish—to mark forth the possible ways of a new negotiation with what is reasonable, but also the ways of an untractable vigilance. Without anger, politics is accommodation and influence-peddling, and to write of politics without anger is to traffic with the seductions of writing.” We have seen in the case of
Cambodia that it is not enough to simply nod our heads in unison to the platitudes with which we always already concur, to a disaster everyone recognizes as such. While such disasters are never comprehensible, if we are to be transformed by them, we need to see the actual countries and people that suffered from them, perhaps as an antidote for the distantiated analysis to which we have become all too accustomed. Dwelling in rural villages in disparate Third World countries need no longer be confined to the work of anthropological or sociological “case studies.” “Global” understanding is now a universal responsibility in all the disciplines, methodologies notwithstanding. As Lingis has noted in a prescription directed perhaps at the postmodernist fetishes of the contemporary critic, “anyone who leaves the television set with its images of consumer euphoria and goes out to visit someone’s village in the Isaan, in the favelas of Rio, the slums of Jakarta, the villages of Africa discovers the character, the bravery, and the pride of singular people; discovers also the community of the outer zone addressed in distress and in anger to us.” This community that addresses its distress must then be addressed in turn. Clearly, therefore, not enough is being done--not just governments and organizations with the political and economic clout to alleviate suffering, entities who truly have much to answer for--but also those with the necessary creative and intellectual resources, whose leadership and wisdom are desperately needed for resolving these very issues, those in whom perhaps a nihilist irony, pessimism, and cynicism have often occluded if not taken the place of serious, transformative political commitment.
The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide is, then, a geographic space pregnant with messages and pedagogical instruction for its viewers. It is a museum disclosing the informe, not as a referent but as a condition. It is, as well, an experience that might be described in similar terms, one which exceeds rational comprehension, surpassing a “limit” of what we do expect those who dwell in the community of persons to undertake. It is a horror of lists, of endless faces without names. It is a horror of gargantuan numbers. It is an “abjection” of banal and unclean spaces, of the instruments and instrumentality of modern violence. And it is a horror of a return from whence we came in terms of the technologies of confinement and control--from computerized surveillance to the panopticon to the gallows to the mass grave. It is a horror of denudation--of the flesh, of voices, of identities, of communities: from the enfleshed body to the skeleton and back again in the form of the residual photographic image, the last vestige of the beings that were once there, in the flesh, but are now but indistinguishable skulls and bones.
Tuol Sleng is also a record of the huge adversities endured in the Third World in this century, an archive of one more example of brutality within a “generalized” economic geography, of the effects arising from First World destruction and apathy, a Sadean disinterest producing monsters abetted or ignored, and finally of a responsibility assumed when it is far too late, when the immediate perpetrators of an abominable terror are dead or dying. Most obviously, the museum is a record of an organization marked by virulent hatred, paranoia, and racism, one whose ideological origins in Khieu Samphan’s University of Paris thesis of 1959 were moderate and coherent: a view that Cambodian cities were parasitic on the work carried out by peasants in the villages and that integration into the world economy retarded the country’s economic development. Such views are perfectly reasonable from today’s postcolonial/critical consciousness. But they were to become something much worse, and this is why Cambodia is such an important problem for those whose intellectual and personal
investments are on the left. As all the varied histories of Cambodia have noted again and again, the intellectuals who were to become the Khmer Rouge and who were to turn
their ire upon all other intellectuals in Cambodian society, lost all contact with the very people their movement was designed to aid. Why this occurred is one of the deep mysteries of the Cambodian experience, a mystery not as far removed as one would wish from the abstractions of intellectual life in western academic practices.
We have seen, therefore, that Tuol Sleng is a store of impermanence, of a metaphorical transience, in that its images are fading under the force of the elements, as well as the impervious whims of those who pass through and collect a bit of the material ambience. The denudation of the present is one in which the fading, deteriorating, and peeling photograph marks the final erasure of the visages contained within. This is an archive with a “shelf life,” or at least an ostensible one, assuming the negatives recently discovered are not used to produce a whole new set of prints to inhabit the walls after the current ones deteriorate. And this is how it should be, for the “archive of memory” must eventually become the “archive of forgetting,” so that those whose images are housed within are not permanently associated only with the single set of events that destroyed their existence, and so that the exigencies of the “present” are not elided in an obsession with the horrors of the past. The foremost human responsibility, then, is one of immediacy, our distresses of the “moment,” which is perhaps the ultimate lesson of Tuol Sleng.

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.