xviii u INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION u xix

Clearly the threat of the reestablishment of a new hierarchy is not as easily escaped as we might have thought when we discussed "The Pineal Eye" and the articles from Documents. It might seem that once God is dead the risk of fascism is inescapable, because there is nothing to guarantee that a privileged impure heterogeneity will not become imperative. In fact Bataille faced this problem on a practical as well as a theoretical plane. Bataille founded a political group of intellectuals called Contre-Attaque with (of all people) Andre Breton in late 1935. 1935-36 was the greatest period of political effervescence in France since the Paris Commune of 1871; it culminated in May-June 1936 with massive strikes in all sectors of the economy and the assumption of power by the Popular Front, an alliance of Socialists and Communists headed by the Socialist Leon Blum. The reader will note in the speech ("Popular Front in the Street") given by Bataille at a Contre-Attaque meeting in November 1935 the emphasis placed on force, agitation, and violence, to the exclusion of boring political and doctrinal debates. By the time this speech was published in May 1936, Breton's surrealist contingent was already disclaiming any association with Contre-Attaque, labeling it "sur-fasciste" (I, 640-41). Bataille himself in later years did not deny that in this group, among Bataille's friends and even in himself, there was a certain "paradoxical fascist tendency" (VII, 461). Effervescence, the subversive violence of the masses, the baseness of their refusal to enter into boring discussionsall these things, then, without a clear and correct (even if boring) theory behind them, could easily be reversed into fascism, as Bataille quickly became aware. Another difficulty in Bataille's arguments, implicit all along, also comes to the fore at this point. To what extent has the dialectic not been subverted in any way by Bataille, to what extent, in paying lip service to the limitlessness of this destructive tendency that constitutes man, does Bataille simply establish a new "need" that must in turn be recognized (at the end of history) and satisfied in order to guarantee the stability of society? Boring, useful laborwhich certainly constitutes stable societywould in this case only be replaced by the safety valve of sacrificial violence or the scapegoat. These forms of institutionalized violence would be useful in that they would guarantee the ultimate permanence of society and of a given social order. This view is frequently found; we see it, in various guises, in Emile Durkheim, in Roger Caillois, and, in the postwar period, in Rene Girard." Bataille seems to take this position already in "The Notion of Expenditure," when he writes of the "need for limitless loss"even though he indicates that, in trying to satisfy this "need," people necessarily run the risk of risking themselves totally, like the gambler who cannot stop, or the chief, engaged in potlatch, who frenziedly destroys everything, including himself. But can any one "need" be different in kind from another, even though one is a need for construction and satisfaction, and the other is a need for destruction

and loss? And if they are not fundamentally different, how radical is this "need to expend"? How different is it from, say, a need for leisure time, or exercise? If man "produces only in order to expend," is expenditure different in kind from any other human value, such as religion or the family? III Bataille's activities after the collapse of Contre-Attaque and up to the start of World War II were divided between two closely linked projects that were nevertheless independent: Acdphale and the College de Sociologie. We will discuss Acdphale first. The public face of Acephale was the review of the same name, which appeared as a small-format brochure only four times between June 1936 and June 1939. Among the contributorsand members of the Acephale group were Bataille (who clearly set the topic for each issue and did a large portion of the writing), Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Klossowski, Jean Wahl, and Jules Monnerot. Bataille was fortunate in having as illustrator Andre Masson, whose sketches portraying the acephalic man in flight and on the ground set the proper cosmological-orgiastic tone. (Bataille had earlier written "Sacrifices" as a preface to a collection of Masson's drawings.) While the review was public (indeed, a proposal for an advertisement ran: "If you are not crushed you must subscribe to Acephale"), the Acephale group itself was considered to be a "secret society," its rituals closed to the public. Clearly Bataille had fundamentally changed his conception of the nature of the political activity to be carried out. Nietzsche now is invoked rather than Marx: Acephale number 2 contains (among other things) responses to right-wing political readings of Nietzsche, showing how the Nazis were misquoting him and misrepresenting his positions ("Nietzsche and the Fascists"). The secret society is a group of adepts, operating in the margins of (and acting against) official society. Bataille for a long time had been interested in marginal groups: Gnostics, madmen, knights, sects of heterodox Christian mystics. The Acephale group was also outside the mainstream of political life: subversive yet not intended to lead an organized mass movement, the activities of the group would help stimulate a rebirth of the kind of social values Bataille had espoused in the Critique Sociale essays: expenditure, risk, loss, sexuality, death. The Acephale group offered nothing in the way of the standard economic and material promisesthat was left to the mainstream groups, though Acephale was certainly not against progressive reforms in the social and economic spheres. But its main goals were the rebirth of myth and the touching off in society of an explosion of the primitive communal drives leading to sacrifice. Myth, as Bataille states in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," is the way open to man after the failure of art, science (and scientific notions of causation), and politics to reach these lower-