A Philosophy of Play (2): Bataille and Death

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 names the underlying logic of all this with a set of terms. Excess. Expenditure. General economy. Sovereignty. Summit. In a strict sense, then he is not writing about leisure when he's talking about play. He is writing about what life does when it has more energy than use can absorb. He is writing about how a person or a community chooses to spend what cannot be saved. He is writing about the way desire and death face each other. If we call that play we are not trivialising it. We are recognising how close the child, the lover, the mystic and the mourner often are.

There is a short novel by Bataille that gives us a precise theatre for these claims. It is arranged as a sequence of one page scenes. The layout insists on clarity. Each scene is a station. The first station is the death of Edouard. Marie is alone with him. The final station leaves the sun shining. Between those facts the book shows a night of exposure, drink, laughter, rivalry, money thrown about, a walk through fields in rain, a return to the room of the dead, a trance, dawn, and Marie’s own death. The argument of my essay is simple. That night is a ceremony of play in the exact sense I have just introduced. It is a use of surplus that accepts waste. It is a nearness to death that refuses to retreat into utility or hygiene. It is an ascent to a summit where ordinary measures do not hold. 

Bataille’s central move is to shift from a restricted economy to a general economy. A restricted economy is what we use to run a business or a household or school. Income. Expense. Saving. Investment. Usefulness. Everything must return to the cycle. A general economy is what we live in when we widen the frame. The earth receives light from the sun that it cannot store forever. Forests grow and burn. Species multiply and die. Human societies harvest energy and ideas until there is more than can be used. Surplus insists on being spent. When it is not spent in festivals and gifts and beauty, it is forced out in violence and waste that no one controls. To think in terms of general economy is to ask, what will we do with our surplus? To live well, in this sense, is to create forms of glorious waste that bind us rather than destroy us. That is why Bataille is drawn to sacrifice, to potlatch, to the splendour of rites, to the calm blaze of the sun. In that frame play is not an interlude. It is a necessary virtue. It is how we accept that much of what matters will never be justified by usefulness.

The first scene in the book is a perfect threshold. A man dies in a room. A woman is present. The first claim is not about the meaning of his life nor about an afterlife. The first claim is a description of what death does to the living who witness it. Marie feels a void open. She feels a rising. She is at once emptied and lifted. Death is not only a subtraction. It is a surge that changes the atmosphere. Anyone who has kept watch in a room like this knows the strange clarity that can arrive when the last breath passes. The body is heavy and still. The air is suddenly light. Language becomes simple and bare. Play begins here in a serious sense. Play is the movement of a being that has remembered that there is no return for much of what is important. Play is the consent to act in that uncluttered air. Marie does not turn to rules or tasks. She tears her clothes and runs into the night. That is not a gesture of disrespect. It is a flight from form into exposure. That exposure is a rite. The scene makes it plain. Wind and rain receive her like a choir.The movement into the open is the first lesson for the reader who wants to understand Bataille’s play. Play is not the pursuit of novelty for its own sake. Play is a method of exposure. A person who plays places herself under forces that are larger than she is. Weather, crowd, laughter, music, drink, nakedness, silence, risk. These are forces that move us when we stop managing every moment. 

The book brings Marie to an inn that is full of bodies and noise. The place is not noble. Farmhands drink. Girls shout. Money changes hands. Such places are often described as low. Bataille refuses that classification. He looks for the measure of sacred intensity rather than for the pedigree of the setting. Sacred here means that which is beyond use. It means the surplus that shines when a community chooses to celebrate. The inn becomes a sanctuary because it is full of waste that is chosen. Drink that will not be recovered. Time that will not be repaid. Displays of beauty and strength that will not be turned into career. Even embarrassment has a place. Embarrassment is often the first sign that we have left the restricted economy. We blush because the social skin is thin at that point.

For a reader unfamiliar with Bataille it helps to keep his definition of eroticism in mind. Eroticism is an approval of life up to the point of death. It is not identical with sexual acts. It is a measure of intensity that includes sex and exceeds it. It is the way a body seeks to lose itself in another, or in a crowd, or in the world, and to survive that loss long enough to recognise the splendour of it. The night in the inn plays out this definition with care. Laughter, dance, and bodily display keep crossing the line between fun and something like devotion. Drink is not only drink. It is a method of forgetting that opens the body to trance. Embarrassing jokes are not only vulgarity. They are the mockery of form that leaves room for an honest blaze. Money thrown about is not only waste. It is a gift that removes the fear that all value must be stored. Rivalries are not only contests. They are forms of expenditure that no one can keep. The inn is play understood as a necessary excess that binds a group for a night.

The characters matter because they test the claim that sacred intensity is a question of rank. The small scene includes a servant named Pierrot and a Count who is a dwarf. Each is drawn with a few strokes. The servant is not idealised. The Count is not condemned. They are present as bodies that carry energy and command. Bataille chooses a figure of power that is physically small and rat like because he refuses to separate beauty and grotesque. The sacred is mixed. It includes splendour and deformity in the same gaze. If you expect a pure vision of nobility, the book will disappoint you. It keeps the sublime and the sordid in one room. This is not provocation. It is accuracy about human nights. The Count also concentrates the theme of death. He stands in the inn like a small emissary of the room where the other man lies. He is drawn to the body as if he were an official of that place. The scene teaches the reader to see how death casts a long light into our pleasures. The point is to make it clear that joy is sharpest when its nearness to loss is not denied.

If we call this play we must be clear that play has rules and forms. The inn is not chaos. It is full of recognisable moves. Someone buys a round. Someone stands on a chair. Someone sings or makes a proclamation. Someone falls and is lifted. Someone shouts that this is enough. These are ritual gestures that allow a group to spend energy without turning the room into a fight. The rule that matters most is the rule that forbids calculation. The moment a person begins to count the return on a gesture, the play drops in pitch. The night in the book keeps its pitch by letting gifts fly and insults fade. This is why the book is arranged as a sequence of discrete scenes. Each page is given its own space. Each scene is played to its end. The form of the book is already a lesson in play. It is discontinuous and exact. It invites the reader to add no moral between scenes. It asks the reader to accept the logic that one intensity does not need to carry a lesson into the next.

After the scenes in the inn the group moves into the rain and mud. They are walking toward the house where the dead lies. The movement becomes a procession. There is no pomp. Boots, puddles, fields. The walk is as solemn as any liturgy because it is simple. Here the meaning of play deepens. Play is not irresponsibility. Play is a form of attention that honours what must be honoured by refusing to bury it under improvement. There is no improvement here because what can be improved about death? A body lies in a room. A small crowd who have spent themselves together go there. They cross a threshold. They enter a cold hallway. They breathe. They speak little. They stand. They hesitate. They act. The scenes do not describe explicit acts in detail because the point is not voyeurism. The point is to let the reader grasp that the separation of death from desire is not absolute in human experience. Many cultures keep vigil with the dead by touching, by washing, by singing over the body, by telling stories that move between sex and death without apology. The book presents a night in which the dead is part of the circuit of intensity.

At this point the idea of summit is useful. For Bataille the summit is any point at which a being reaches a state beyond measure. This is not a peak of achievement but a peak of intensity. The summit appears when a person or a group has spent so much that the ordinary distinctions fall quiet. The book marks this summit with a trance in which Marie is described as almost beyond speech. Images of light and foliage flood the page. It is as if the sun were present inside a dark house. The trance is not presented as escape. It is presented as an acceptance of annihilation as splendour. The body is near collapse. The spirit is full. The words come slow. The reader who is not familiar with such scenes may be tempted to call it madness. The better word within the frame of the book is rapture. Rapture here is not a reward. It is the natural crest of play understood as excess that faces death without flinching.

Dawn arrives. The book refuses to turn dawn into redemption. Light does not correct the night. It shows what has been spent. Bodies are exhausted. Movements are small. A canal shines. The quiet that follows is not a moral. It is the flat truth that the world goes on. In that quiet Marie dies. The logic is strict. The first chapter shows a woman raised by the death of a man. The last chapters show that woman dying after a night in which she accepted life to the point of death. The argument of the book is complete with that simple fact. A person can consent to life so fully that she chooses to spend it. Consent here is not a theory. It is a sequence of actions and exposures. For a reader new to Bataille this is where the term sovereignty becomes clear. Sovereignty is not domination. Sovereignty is the right to spend without asking permission. A person who dies in this mood is sovereign in the only sense that matters in his thought.

The sun remains at the end. The image is the emblem of general economy. It gives without asking. It burns without concern for our schedules. It is the source of all that grows and the cause of all that must be spent. Ending on the sun affirms a measure beyond the household and beyond the law. The reader who is unused to this emphasis may want to ask, what's the point of all this, what's good about it? The answer within the book is that the good in question is a different kind of good. It is the good of having honoured the surplus that filled those people on that night. It is the good of having refused to lie about the closeness of death to desire. It is the good of having made a form in which play could be exact and dangerous and binding and free.

The examples in the book that guide a newcomer are the small moves that many will recognise from life. A person climbs on a chair and speaks. A bottle passes from hand to hand. Coins are flung onto a counter. A person bursts into laughter at a moment that would usually require silence. A person keeps looking when habit says to look away. A person walks in rain rather than summoning a carriage. A person opens a door without asking if it is on the programme. Those are all small forms of play. They become sacred when they are woven together into a night that leads to a room and a body. They become sacred when those forms keep their pitch and do not collapse into cruelty. There are lines that must not be crossed if play is to remain play. Consent is a line. Care for the weak is a line. Hospitality is a line. The book does not preach those lines. It stages a night in which they hold and in which they are tested at the edge.

There are three ideas to keep in view. First, life generates surplus. This is a fact of seasons, economies and bodies. A person who works will sometimes be overtaken by energy that cannot be used for work. A community that saves will sometimes be overtaken by wealth that cannot be invested without distortion. Cultures have always invented festivals and rites to spend this surplus. You can test this claim in your own life by asking what you do with your best moments of joy when no one is watching. Second, taboo and transgression belong to the same order. Taboos protect the sacred by marking it out of ordinary use. Transgressions that are lucid cross those lines to touch the sacred and return with knowledge. The inn scenes are transgressions because they violate decorum and cleanliness. The walk to the corpse is a transgression because it brings desire near to death. They are lucid because they are done with eyes open, without cruelty, for the sake of truth. Third, sovereignty is the acceptance that the highest goods are those that cannot be calculated. Play is sovereign. Sacrifice is sovereign. Art at its best is sovereign. There is no way to measure them by salary or grade. If you demand that measure, you have already left the summit.

From this frame we can say what a playful attitude to death looks like. It begins by allowing the fact of death to make the air clear. It stays with the dying. It keeps watch. It permits crying and laughter without shame. It permits exposure to mood and to company at odds with etiquette. It knows that there will be a need to move, to drink, to sing, to insult, to give, to fall silent. It allows these moves as ways of spending the surplus that grief awakens. It turns toward the body again when the time comes. It accepts that desire and death are not separate. It allows trance to arrive if it arrives. It lets dawn be dawn. It refuses to pretend that dawn solves anything. It accepts that sometimes the life that has spent itself most fully will stop. It keeps the sun in mind. It returns to ordinary time with a memory of clarity. These are inflections of care that keep play from being consumed by guilt or by mania.

The first scene in which Marie first runs out after the death offers the first clear picture of play as exposure. The world at night has its own pressure. Wind has a weight. Rain has a taste. A person who has seen someone die will often feel restless at once. The temptation is to sit and control oneself. The other option is to step out and be moved by what is larger. Marie steps out. She strips and runs. The page records what happens when a body finds the right scale of contact after a shock. The right scale here is not a room and not a city but the elements. That is why the chapter is short. The contact is the claim. Anyone who has walked out of a hospital at night and stood under a streetlight in drizzle will recognise the truth of this.

The scene at the inn in which someone stands on a chair and laughs ties play to form. It would be a mistake to think that play means chaos. Even wild nights have a score. The chair is a small stage. The person on it becomes a momentary centre. A sentence is shouted. A bottle is lifted. The room replies. This is a safe way to let the group waste energy without starting a fight. Anyone who has worked in a place where the only gatherings are meetings will understand this. A human group needs scenes that carry no agenda and without them the surplus comes out in cruelty or in boredom that hurts the soul. Bataille is is saying that laughter and display are rites that keep a community honest about its energies. This is why he keeps the noble and the comic together. The Count is in the room with the farmhands. The grotesque is held in the same light as the beautiful. This speaks to our current obsessions with beauty and health. We need to hold ugliness up as well as beauty, the unhealthy as well as the healthy. The sacred shines from this mixture.

The scene in the room with the dead is to show that a culture that forbids touch and song around a body will have to invent compensations elsewhere. The people in the book do not outsource the truth or call a service at once. Rather, they keep vigil. They approach the bed. They let the fact of the body change their behaviour. Anyone used to hospital protocols may be uneasy here. It helps to remember that for most of human history bodies were prepared for burial by those who loved them. The nearness of desire to the body of the dead may seem scandalous. Bataille's point is to understand that eros and death are closer than we would like to admit. A culture that accepts that closeness may be kinder. It may be less likely to turn its surplus into harm in other places. Bataille is asking us to look without flinching at the moment in which a person sees that the line between living body and dead body is not the line between sense and nonsense. It is the line where play changes key.

From these scenes we can specify the virtues that belong to play understood as excess and summit. Courage to be seen. Courage to give without counting. Courage to waste time and money in order to make a night binding. Courage to mix beauty and grotesque without shame. Courage to face the dead without pretending to be above the body. Courage to welcome trance if it comes. Courage to let dawn be morning and not a lesson. Courage to accept that sometimes the right end is death, not because death is a prize, but because life is not a debt to be repaid but a surplus to be spent. These are not easy virtues. They depend on a community that will not punish them. Bataille shows how even a small and mixed group can provide such a community for a few hours. It is enough.

I return to the word play because it keeps us from turning these ideas into forbidding doctrine. When a child plays, the child does something useless with full seriousness. When lovers play, they accept exposure and embarrassment in order to reach an hour that changes them. When an artist plays, the artist wastes time and materials in order to make something that may never pay for itself. When a mourner plays, the mourner keeps a vigil that has no function beyond honour. The book makes this convergence visible. It does so by cutting away all explanation inside the scenes. It shows. It stops. It shows again. 

There is a temptation to argue that such play is a luxury. The reply is that it is a necessity. A person who cannot waste becomes hard. A community that cannot waste becomes cruel. A school that cannot waste produces boredom. A city that cannot waste invents disasters to do the wasting for it. The choice is never between waste and no waste. The choice is between lucid expenditure and blind loss. Bataille is not saying that all waste is good. He is saying that waste that binds is our best protection against waste that destroys. Bataille's book is a parable of a night in which waste binds. The price is high. A man dies. A woman dies. The price would have been paid anyway. The question is whether those deaths will be faced with clarity and gaiety or with denial and numbness. Bataille shows the first response.

The sun at the end is not consolation. It is measure. It says that our rites are small compared to thire source. It says that our play is part of a general metaphorical fire. It teaches humility without humiliation. Bataille's philosophy gives measures and images. It gives the sun and a canal and a whistle and a splash and a chair in a bar and a wet lane and a bed. From those measures and images a person can derive ways to live. Consent to exposure. Keep company with both the noble and the low. Give without bargaining. Stay near the body. Allow trance. Accept dawn without redemption. Remember the sun. These are the elements of a playful courage.

Play in the sense I have given is the name for Bataille’s philosophy of excess and summit as it is lived rather than theorised. Life produces surplus. Surplus must be spent. Sacred intensity appears where communities choose to waste lucidly. Eroticism is approval of life up to the point of death. Sovereignty is the right to spend without return. The book about Marie and the night after Edouard’s death is a compact theatre in which these truths are staged without commentary. It begins with a woman lifted by the death of a man. It passes through exposure, drink and laughter that make a low place holy. It carries a small crowd along a muddy lane to a room where the dead lies. It shows trance. It shows dawn. It lets a woman die without drama. It leaves the sun shining. The lesson is a lesson about honesty. There are nights when play is the only adequate response to the fact of death. Play in this Bataillean sense is not a party of denial but a ritual of consent.

A playful attitude toward death in the Bataille sense is an art of measured excess. It is the decision to expose oneself to forces that exceed one’s management. It is the willingness to let joy and grief be neighbours. It is the patience to let small forms carry great weight. It is the refusal to tidy away the nearness of desire to loss. It is the practice of giving time, money and face in order to make a group brave for a few hours. It is the quiet at dawn that does not invent a solution or some sort of redemption. It is the memory of the sun that prevents bitterness.