xxii u INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION u xxiii

seems unlikely that, had Leiris and Caillois been present at the meeting of July 4, 1939, they would have been satisfied by Bataille's remarks. In any case, he continued his research in what for him were the most basic questions of anthropology and sociology, and this work led in the postwar period to the extremely important La Part Maudite (1949; The Cursed Share, untranslated) (VII, 17-179), as well as to L'Erotisme (1957; translated as Death and Sensuality). 21 If the theoretical orientation of Ac6phale moved toward a radical "individual" experience of non-sense, it would seem that the College was oriented in the opposite direction, toward a consideration of the human being and human expenditure as a function of collective (or social) needs or desires. Here we run up against the problem that we broached at the end of the last section: how radical is this expenditure if it merely fulfills another need of society and through this fulfillment guarantees society's perpetual subsistence? Bataille states this problem at the end of the "College of Sociology" lecture of July 4, 1939: " . . . it is difficult to know to what extent the community is but the favorable occasion for a festival and a sacrifice, or to what extent the festival and the sacrifice bear witness to the love given to the community." Bataille here confronts as a kind of "impasse" the "last question of man." Is the community a means to the end of free expenditure, or is this expenditure a means to the end of a stable community? It would seem that any theory concerned with the various forms that a community can take and with the mutations of communities throughout history (problems tackled by Bataille both in the College lectures and in La Part maudite) must value the community itself (and the definitive form(s) it will take at the "end of history") over a radical negativity that is in itself unknowable and ungraspable. But the Acephale writings apparently go in the opposite direction: the last issue of Acephale, number 5, appearing in June 1939 (and entitled "Madness, War, and Death"), puts forward a largely individual experience, which seems to go beyond the constraints of any notion of community, sect, or life itself ("The Practice of Joy before Death"). It would seem that either direction would lead to an impasse. The valuing of community or society over the radicality of experience itself would, in the end, result in a vision of an ultimate homogeneous social structure that uses sacrifice or festivals; such a community could not be seen as different in kind from a bourgeois and finally even a Marxist society erected on the principles of classical utility (that is, on the denial of expenditure without return). This at least would he the necessary point of view of the "acephalic" position. On the other hand, the sheer negativity of the individual or the elite Acephale group, seen for a moment from the point of view of the larger community, can only be a nihilistic emptiness that, headless or not, elevates itself as an absolute and therefore leads at best to simple individual death or wandering, and at worst to extremely sin-

ister political configurations (regimes of the right are only too happy, as is well known, to make use of previously unharnessed violence). At this point we do not want to suggest that there is necessarily a solution to this problem; indeed it is probably not solvable. But this very insolvability may be the most radical moment in Bataille's text, a moment of automutilation or "nonlogical difference" in which two necessary and incompatible positions impossibly meet. Bataille's radicality, then, may stem not so much from the content of his "positions" themselves as from their violent interaction. This may in fact be one of the things implied in Bataille's statement MYSELF AM WAR" (in "The Practice of Joy before Death"). It should be remembered that at no time in the later 1930sor after, for that matterdid Bataille deny or refuse Kojve's Marxist Hegel (see, in this context, the "Letter to X, Teacher of a Course on Hegel" [1937; V, 369-71]). Yet the joining of a constructive dialectic of any sort, or its telos, to a definitively "unemployable" negativity could only result in a profoundly fissured writing." One can in fact follow this fissure in Bataille's writings of the war years and the postwar period: the aphoristic Somme Atheologique (1943-45; The Summa Atheologica, untranslated), which values individual contingency, loss, and fragmentation, is doubled and defied by another group of texts, including La Part maudite and L'Erotisme, which put

forward a finally coherent theory of history and society (a society that has expenditure as its most fundamental phenomenon). We must not conclude from this, however, that Bataille's text, in its automutilation, is simply a sterile (antisocial and apolitical) negativity into which one willingly enters and which leads nowhere but ever further into itself. If Bataille's text is double, it leads necessarily and impossibly in two directions at once: to choose one directionin this case one that leads away from society and social analysisat the expense of the other is to reduce a bicephalic text to a monocephalic one, to choose the secret rites of the Acephale (performed this time with only a text as the victim and the labyrinth) and to refuse the public and even political activity of the College. This is a choice that Bataille himself refused to make. And in the current "end of history" the labor of the "recognition" of unrecognizable negativity has just begun.
Notes 1. All references to Bataille in French, unless otherwise noted, are to the Oeuvres Completes in nine volumes (so far) (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). The volume number precedes the page number. Histoire de l'oeil (1928) has been published in a translation by J. Neugroschel as Story of the Eye (New York: Urizen Books, 1977). The description of Bataille's father is on pp. 106-10 of the English translation. 2. See Denis Hollier's La Prise de la Concorde: Essais sur Georges Bataille (Paris: Gallimard, 1974) for an examination of the importance of architecture's rise and fall in Bataille. 3. As recounted in Histoire de l'oeil (1, 52-56) and Story of the Eye, pp. 72-74.