Essays

I will use the word play to name what is at stake in Bataille’s writing on surrealism and on Manet. Play joins bodies to scenes. It binds a room. It spends a surplus that work cannot absorb. In Bataille’s vocabulary this means expenditure rather than accumulation. It means a movement toward continuity from the ordinary state of discontinuous selves. It means taboo held and then crossed under a rule, so that danger becomes knowledge rather than harm. On this ground surrealism is not a style. It is the invention of forms that let a culture without a binding myth still generate nights and rooms in which the sacred can appear without doctrine.

Eroticism is play in the specific sense that Bataille gives to excess. It is an assent to life that spends more than usefulness demands. It is a consent to risk that seeks an intensity which cannot be recovered as profit or lesson. It is a movement toward a summit where the ordinary measures fall away. To present this clearly I will introduce the main ideas from Bataille’s book on eroticism.

Play is the word I will use for what Bataille calls excess and summit. I choose it because the common sense of the word keeps the thought from turning into an abstract doctrine. Children play. Lovers play. Rituals in their oldest form are organised play. Festivals turn labour into play for a day or a week. When economies prosper, surplus becomes sport and spectacle. When they collapse, the same impulse returns as riot and dance and laughter that has no business plan.

Bataille is a writer who says he writes out of fear that he might go mad, and who confesses to an ardent aspiration that consumes him, an aspiration that cannot be translated into ordinary moral action or theological service, because it belongs to a region where obligation no longer commands, and where language itself loses its authority the moment it tries to persuade toward any useful end. In the preface to his meditation on Mr Nietzsche, Bataille sketches a solitude that follows once one no longer serves the good or God, and he laments that Nietzsche, who called for a new order of disciples, found only vulgar praise and misunderstanding, notably political misappropriations that he detested.

This essay begins with a simple claim. To understand the new politics growing inside today’s technological infrastructure we need philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner’s triple lens of rationalism, nationalism and civil society. Rationalism is a public craft of giving reasons that others can inspect. Nationalism is the standardised high culture that lets strangers work and argue together. Civil society is “that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue,” and the residue that matters is “large, powerful, and organised,” with “membership… optional or revocable,” able “to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly.” The three elements belong together, they tell us how arguments become binding, how a common idiom is sustained without being monopolised, and how organised counterweights keep offices separate from office holders.