The Anthropology of Exit: Bataille on Heidegger and Fascism*

STEFANOS GEROULANOS

To critique Martin Heidegger is a difcult operation. It means that one accepts at least the bulk of Heideggers conception of Being and wants to push this conception further. To some extent it means that one wants to rethink Heideggers ontological difference, to radicalize his antisubjectivism, and to escape from the limitations of his worldview. And, politically, it can also mean that one wants to evade or go beyond Heideggers Nazism, beyond the philosophical anthropology that his political theology entailed, beyond the stigma associated with it. I want to demonstrate that in the mid-1930s, Georges Bataille did exactly this. At some point in the period 193437, Bataille scribbled some twenty 13.5 by 21 cm pages that he titled La Critique de Heidegger: Critique dune philosophie du fascisme.1 He collated these pages onto larger, thinner sheets, corrected them, and marked them as an appendix, but did not attach them to another text.2 At stake in this draft is a number of issues paramount to our understanding of Batailles contribution to interwar thought. Here, Bataille joins a spiritual exercise aiming to undo social homogeneity with an ontological, anti-Hegelian appreciation of insufciency and escape, and also with a theologico-political analysis of modernity and fascism. Seeking to grant Cartesian rigor to his search for emancipation from homogeneity, Bataille turns to a non-Hegelian, non-Heideggerian Being outside, which, not content with discrediting nonphenomenological interpretations of contemporary politics, moves to attack what he sees as phenomenologys conformity with modern
* I would like to express my gratitude to Hent de Vries, Christian Pinawin, and Anson Rabinbach for their help throughout; Guillaume Fau of the Bibliothque Nationale de France for his help at the Fonds Bataille; and Jeroen Gerrits, Nils Schott, Martin Shuster, and Joyce Tsai who helped me to improve and clarify the nal version of this text. 1. Georges Bataille, Appendice: Critique de Heidegger, Bibliothque Nationale de France (BNF), Dpartement des Manuscrits Occidentaux, Fonds Bataille, 4.XXVIbis. Hereafter cited in the text as CH, with references rst to the BNFs pagination, then to the present editions. Citations of Batailles text are given here without the crossed-out passages. 2. As far as the dating of the text is at issue, not only are the issues Bataille raises specic to this period, as I will try to show, but the relatively clear script looks like that of Batailles other texts and letters from the same period, whereas his wartime and postwar handwriting is more uid and harder to decipher. In the Fonds Bataille, the manuscript of Critique of Heidegger is led with the proofs of the 1952 article Le passage de lanimal lhomme et la naissance de lart. In their content, terminology, and style, the two essays bear no resemblance; it is unlikely that their ling is purposeful. OCTOBER 117, Summer 2006, pp. 324. 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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profane uniformity. Though Bataille irts quite openly with fascism, for the rst and perhaps only time he also explicitly advocates an exit from homogeneity, indicating that fascism paradoxically reinforces the profane uniformity it purports to overcome. Bataille does all this under the guise of a study of Heidegger, whom, despite occasional references, he never otherwise granted explicit pride of place in his philosophical writingsand whose name in this text he mentions only twice (one of these instances being in the title). Nevertheless, he subtly takes notions like Being, the pure ego, and intention as starting points for an interrogation of modernity. He then turns against them to decry the phenomenological monde de lhomognit as stranded in the very immanence it conceptualizes. Incapable of recognizing the worlds genuine allure and real misery, dependent on and symptomatic of hollow social and theologico-political demands, Heideggerian phenomenology for Bataille reduces existence to desolated orderly equivalence. Before approaching the more complex philosophical problems Bataille raises, especially questions of life amid homogeneity, of the exit from Being and from the political anthropology of modernity, the present essay situates Critique of Heidegger historically, seeking to consider the two philosophers relations to fascism and explain how Bataille understood and criticized Heideggers thoughtin particular why he picked Heidegger as representative of fascism. Bataille and Fascism The association of Bataille with fascism has been a matter of considerable debate, most of it pointing to his peculiar role in antifascist milieux. This is not the place to retrace or replay that debate; still, the problem is signicant, because Batailles political equivocation sets up his analysis and colors his identication of Heidegger with fascism. To quote Zeev Sternhell, fascism had a fascination for men . . . for whom any attempt to transcend bourgeois mediocrity and democratic accidity was highly praiseworthy.3 That Bataille shared this fascination has given much ammunition to Batailles detractors, who argue that his nonconformism played an active role in the delegitimation of the Third Republic.4 Some contemporary cultural historians have echoed Jean-Paul Sartre and other critics in arguing that Batailles philosophical anthropology relied on a strategy of (a) articulating human experience on the basis of vitalist or mystical postulates, and (b) providing a consequent critique of bourgeois secularism (a critique ex denitione hostile to liberal democracy and socialist utopia) that rivaled fascism in its reactionary aims and substance. Some further argue that Batailles claims on heterogeneity evince a hidden pro-Nazism that is supposedly part and parcel of postwar critiques of liberal humanism.5
3. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 220. Sternhell does not mention Bataille. 4. See Daniel Lindenberg, Les Annes souterraines 19371947 (Paris: Dcouverte, 1990). 5. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 4. It is worth noting that in his critique of Batailles mysticism, Sartre accuses Bataille of not

The Anthropology of Exit

Supporters respond that Bataille never collaborated with the occupiers and that his fascination with fascisms aestheticized and sacralized politics by no means amounted to support for a Nazi takeover. They point to the sobriety with which he described fascisms capacities,6 to his defense of Nietzsche against Nazi appropriation,7 and to his heated rejections of the French radical right in Contre-Attaque and in his own notes.8 Indeed, Bataille did not resemble French fascists: he was no nationalist, no anti-Semite, no antimaterialist (a vitalist qua supermaterialist if anything), and hardly a supporter of moral rejuvenation. He did not move in fascist milieux, like Marcel Dat, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, or Robert Brasillach. For his more careful defenders, this ambiguous investment points rst of all to the failure of the democratic imaginary in the 1930s, but also marks Batailles attempt to imagine modernity as a tragic clash between classical rationality and an inner, unruly, excessive humanity. Unless kept in suspension, such a clash leads to abdications of sovereignty in favor of fascist projects,9 yet such suspension also leaves Bataille open to charges of antifascist fascism, superfascism,10 even an archefascism resembling Heideggers or Ernst Jngers.11 Batailles ambivalence toward war, his assertion that fascism was a perfectly rational successor to republicanism, and his contempt for democracys destruction of the being of societies (CH, p. 3; p. 27) all question the leftist credentials of his call to use fascist means against fascisma call that Bataille himself would come to regret.12 Of interest in Critique of Heidegger is Batailles theologico-political analysis of modern democracy and his rejection of fascism as illusory and insufcient. In this regard, his 1930s work recalls other contemporaries not fully committed to

understanding Heidegger. See Sartre, Un nouveau mystique, Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 156; trans. Situations (New York: Braziller, 1965), p. 145. 6. For example in his 1934 essay Fascism in France, in Rebecca Comay, ed., Bataille: Writings from the 1930s, Alphabet City 4/5 (1996), pp. 5061. 7. Bataille, Nietzsche et le National-socialisme, in Sur Nietzsche (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 23132; trans. Nietzsche and National Socialism, in On Nietzsche, trans. B. Boone (New York: Paragon House, 1992), pp. 17273. 8. Bataille, En attendant la grve generale, in Bataille, Oeuvres compltes II: crits posthumes 19221940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 254, 264. Hereafter cited in the text as OC, with roman numerals following for the volume. 9. Denis Hollier, Absent without Leave (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 8283. 10. Superfascism is the term used by self-exculpating Surrealists disavowing Bataille and their own role in Contre-Attaque. See Bataille, Among the Surrealists, Alphabet City 4/5 (1996), p. 61. 11. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe uses arche-fascism when writing of Heidegger in The Spirit of National Socialism and its Destiny, in Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 149. 12. Maurice Blanchot, Les Intellectuels en question, Le Dbat 29 (March 1984), pp. 1920. The philosophical signicance of Batailles political disengagement is recounted in Peter Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 147. It is important to reject the claim that Bataille helped delegitimate the Third Republic: to assign such responsibility to a pornographer-mystic-philosopher who had only published a few scattered essays misses both the problems and the very real strength of the Third Republic. Recent historical works have also questioned the signicance of the intellectual delegitimation of the Third Republic (e.g., Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], chaps. 35).

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a political cause, in that it is concerned less with a critique of democracy per se than with the contestation of the primacy of secular/liberal/positivist motifs in European Spirit. Such condemnations of existing democracies often mingled with attacks on claims of nineteenth-century science or on the Enlightenment potential for barbarismin a sense they sought to save a spirit of autonomy by rejecting democracy. In the context Bataille was among the rst to analyze fascisms sacralization of politics, its inversion of the Augustinian idea of the City of Man, and its attack on the claims of modern individualism.13 He identied fascisms overcoming of profane democratic reality with a political Unhappy Consciousness that replaces the good God with the Chef-Dieu (God-Leader). The attention paid to themes like sovereignty and freedom in Critique of Heidegger further expresses Batailles hostility toward democracy, the regime that he accuses of obliterating them in favor of a society composed of (and constructing) undifferentiated, unself-conscious subjects. Heidegger:Philosopher of Fascism? That Bataille refers to Heidegger in the 1930s is curious; that he does so using the tag philosopher of fascism is remarkable. Sticking to Heideggers own account in the Letter on Humanism (1946), historians of his French reception have generally treated only the 1940s as the coming of age of French Heideggerianism, recognizing (a) a misbegotten, anthropological wave starting in the early 1930s and culminating in Sartres Being and Nothingness ; (b) the postwar political debate in Les Temps modernes and other journals (194447); and (c) the more felicitous and supposedly more rigorous approach that begins in the late 1940s, with Jean Beaufret, Jean Hyppolite, and others, and that becomes an important inuence on poststructuralism.14 The above interpretation sees the 1930s as little more than an opening to these later developments, and notes the appearance of Emmanuel Levinass book on Edmund Husserl, Alexandre Kojves Hegel seminar, and Henri Corbins translation of Was ist Metaphysik? (What Is Metaphysics?) in the journal Bifur as setting up the anthropological rst phase. This schema underplays both the reasons (epistemological, scientic, religious) that brought attention to Heidegger among philosophers in the rst place and the considerable transformations in philosophy of science, religion, and humanism that ensued. At the heart of the turn to Husserl and Heidegger is a generational paradigm shift that repudiated the positivism, intellectualism, and neo-Kantianism of older French thinkers. Attention to their work came from a young, little-established group of thinkers
13. Bataille, La structure psychologique du fascisme, in OC I, pp. 34648, 35456; trans. The Psychological Structure of Fascism, in Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 19271939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 143, 15456. 14. See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France , 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001); Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heideggers Philosophy in France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Bernard Waldenfels, Phnomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983).

The Anthropology of Exit

who taught either outside of Paris (Wahl until 1936, Canguilhem), at the slightly marginal cole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Koyr, Kojve, Bachelard), or simply not at university level (Marcel, Levinas, Sartre). Many of these thinkers were immigrants from the Soviet Union, had a German formation, and felt little enthusiasm for the previous generation in academic French philosophy (Alain, Bergson, Brunschvicg, Meyerson, etc.). For these foreigners, as for their French contemporaries like Sartre, Maurice de Gandillac, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology provided until-then unimaginable grounding force of epistemological rigor. For example, echoing arguments by Gaston Bachelard and Koyr, the (later) Hegelian philosopher Kojve did not hesitate to argue in 1931 that Heideggers distinction of Dasein (Being-there) from Vorhandensein (presence-at-hand) made possible, for the rst time, a philosophical understanding of scientic transformations, especially of the observing/observed systems distinction in Heisenbergs interpretation of quantum mechanics.15 Already in 1928, Sartre had met the Japanese philosopher Count Kuki Shu zo , who, during a short sjour in Paris, rst mentioned Husserl and Heidegger to him,16 long before Raymond Aron famously pointed to his martini glass and fantasized about the effect of phenomenology on Sartre.17 For foreigners who, like Kuki, had studied at least in part in Germany, phenomenology (especially Heideggers, but also Husserls and Schelers) provided the crucial distancing mechanism against the elders Kantianism, especially insofar as it accompanied the new, antipositivist philosophy of science of Bachelard and Koyr, and philosophically grounded protoexistentialist approaches toward immanence and the role of metaphysical investigations. It is also said that few knew of Heideggers Nazism until the postwar communist attack on it provoked the famous quarrel in Les Temps modernes (194547).18 Nonetheless, it is now evident that the political debate began in the 1930s: Levinas would later recall rst hearing of Heideggers Nazism from Koyr before 1933; he took the news with stupor and disappointment, and also with the faint hope that it expressed only the momentary lapse of a great speculative mind into practical banality.19 Also prior to 1933, Arnaud Dandieu noted the afnity between Nazism
15. See my Le ralisme sans fondement: Physique quantique et phnomnologie au tournant des annes 30 (Wahl, Bachelard et Kojve), in Frdric Worms and Giuseppe Bianco, eds., Jean Wahl (Paris: Editions Rue dUlm/PUF, forthcoming 2006). 16. See Heidegger, Unterwegs der Sprache (Tbingen: Neske, 1959), pp. 85, 89; trans. On the Way to Language (London: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 1, 6; and his interview in LExpress, October 20, 1969, p. 171. See also Stephen Light, ed., Shu zo Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). 17. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Force de lage (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 141; trans. The Prime of Life (New York: Paragon Books, 1992), p. 112. 18. See Janicaud, Heidegger en France 1, chap. 3; and Kleinberg, Generation Existential, chap. 5. 19. Emmanuel Levinas, Comme un consentement lhorrible, Le Nouvel observateur, January 22, 1988, p. 82; trans. in Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989), p. 485. Nevertheless, a review by either Koyr or Levinas defended Heidegger, in 1933, from Hans Drieschs accusation of a mysticism of the irrational (Revue philosophique 116 [1933], pp. 29091).

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and Heideggers thought and popularity in a text for the Revue dAllemagne.20 In an astonishing 1934 formulation, Gandillac paralleled Ernst Cassirers compliant comportment toward Heidegger at the 1929 Davos debate to the succumbing of the German people to the Fhrers magnetism.21 Paul Nizan dismissed Andr Malrauxs arrangement of solitude, politics, and anxiety in La Condition humaine (1933) as derivative of Sein und Zeit (1927) and its worrying politics.22 In 1936, La Nouvelle revue thologique published a book review that spoke of a shared understanding of Heidegger as the metaphysician of Nazism. 23 And in 1938, Jean Wahl opened his philosophy course reprising Einleitung in die Philosophie, Heideggers own 1929 course, by expressing his displeasure with Heideggers public function in Nazi Germany (the 193334 Rectorate), a function that politically tainted his philosophical call for inner Fhrerschaft (leadership) through Being-towarddeath.24 Working on Heideggers 192829 course, Wahl told his students, would dispense with this more recent problem. It is not excessive to claim then that this sensitivity to the political question appears to have been common currency in the group surrounding Koyr and the 193137 journal Recherches philosophiques, the group whose former members shaped Heideggers early reception and after 1945 came to share a highly critical approach to him.25 In general, these thinkers scorned his embrace of Nazism, working to improve his thought and explicitly associating him with fascism. Among those close to Koyr, Bataille was the rst to assign Heidegger the altogether different tag of philosopher of fascism. Batailles Claim to Philosophy How much did Bataille know of Heideggers thought and politicsand from what position could he call Heideggers a philosophy of fascism? In his 1946 review of Levinas and Wahls contributions to existentialism, Bataille wrote:

20. Arnaud Dandieu, Philosophie de langoisse et politique du dsespoir, Revue dAllemagne 60 (1932), pp. 88391. Cited in Hollier, A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 895. 21. Maurice de Gandillac, Le Sicle travers: souvenirs de neuf dcennies (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), p. 134. 22. Cited in Jean-Franois Lyotard, Signed, Malraux (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 164. Nizan had been the editor of Bifur , in which Corbins translation of What Is Metaphysics? appeared. 23. Henri Thielemons, Existence tragique: la mtaphysique du nazisme, La Nouvelle revue thologique 6 (1939), pp. 56179. 24. IMEC Fonds Wahl, Dossier Heidegger, Chemise Heidegger, p. 6. See Heideggers Gesamtausgabe 27 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996) and Wahls 1945 reprisal of this course, interesting especially for its distortions. Wahl, Introduction la pense de Heidegger (Paris: LGF, 1999). 25. In addition to Levinass elaborate critiques of Heidegger, see Wahls Vers la n de lontologie (Paris: ditions de lEnseignement Suprieur, 1956), where Wahl asks whether the question of Being is not after all a question mal pose Koyrs objections to inviting Heidegger to Crisy in 1955, and Kojves March 1968 interview (Quinzaine Litteraire 115 [June 1968], pp. 1820), where Kojve, asked why he no longer sought out philosophers, replied Philosophers? Who? . . . Heidegger? You know that Heidegger, as a philosopher, turned out really bad.

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In Heidegger, the authentic appears as a consciousness of the authentic; it is apparently no more than the nostalgia for rare authentic moments which occur in a life of professional studies given over to the knowledge of the authentic. This life does not seem to be dominated by a terrible passion: one cannot be surprised by a slippage, which is not necessary but possible, from the authentic to Hitlerism. What dominated Heidegger was doubtless the intellectual desire to reveal being (being and not existence) in discourse (in philosophical language).26 Responding here to those who would classify Heidegger as an obscurissime counterpart to Sartre,27 Bataille throws out the whole existentialist dimension of Heideggers work. His condemnation echoes those leveled at Heidegger by the nonorthodox early generation (Kojve, Koyr, Levinas, Wahl) from the 1930s. It is original in that, written in 1947, it recalls neither the postwar Heideggerian/Sartrean claim of having tolerated Nazism to defend the university from it, nor the Marxist retort that Heideggers Nazism was existentialisms true face. Rather, it argues that Heideggers misdirected project toward authenticity turned to fascism because it forsook passion for knowledge. Even when he writes that among contemporaries only Heidegger commands admiration,28 placing him in a Heidegger/Marx/Hegel pantheon, Bataille again expresses serious concerns with Heideggers intellectual search for the authentic.29 Still, Batailles 1930s texts give rather unsure signs of his interest in phenomenology. His literary output (especially Le Bleu du ciel [1935]) does not echo the encounters with nothingness to be found in Malraux, Nizan, and other contemporaries. Yet, his most significant reference is a footnote to The Psychological Structure of Fascism, where he notes that the absence of any methodological considerations . . . will not fail to astonish and shock those who are unfamiliar with French sociology, modern German philosophy (phenomenology), and psychoanalysis.30 He later recalled having read a draft of Corbins French translation of What Is Metaphysics?,31 a text he found seductive, and, echoing Koyrs intro26. Bataille, De lexistentialisme au primat de lconomie, in OC XI , p. 285 ; trans. From Existentialism to the Primacy of Economy (1947), in Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 161. Italics Heideggers. 27. Alphonse de Waelhens, Lexistentialisme de M. Sartre est-il un humanisme?, Revue philosophique de Louvain 44 (1946), p. 293. 28. See Hegel dans le monde prsent: Prface loeuvre de Kojve in BNF Fonds Bataille IV.25, 4, pp. 3335, citation p. 33 (see also p. 30); see also BNF Fonds Bataille, env. 18, p. 145. A version of this Preface to Kojve was published as Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice, in Deucalion 5 (Neuchatel: Baconnire [tre et penser], 1955), pp. 2144; trans. Hegel, Death, and Sacrice, in Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, eds., The Bataille Reader (London: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 27995. 29. The high regard may have been mutual. In the 1950s, Heidegger apparently called Bataille la meilleure tte pensante franaise. However, according to a 1962 letter by Bataille to Jerme Lindon, Heidegger was mistaking him for Blanchot. See Bataille, Choix de letters 19171962 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 58283. 30. Bataille, La structure psychologique du fascisme, p. 339, n. *; The Psychological Structure of Fascism, p. 160, n. 1. 31. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1960); trans. Quest-ce que la

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duction, on equal footing with life;32 and in January 1934, Bataille read Sein und Zeit.33 His comprehension can be traced to the two interrelated institutions responsible for phenomenologys early diffusion: the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes and the journal Recherches philosophiques. From 1931 to 1933, Bataille attended courses by Koyr at the EPHE, notably Relations Between Science and Religion in the Sixteenth Century; two courses on Nicolas of Cusa; and a course on the young Hegelwhom Koyr engaged as the conclusion of his history of German mysticism.34 As is well known from 1933 on, Bataille became a regular in Kojves famous seminar on Hegels Religious Philosophy,35 from which he inherited Kojves mix of Hegel and Heidegger. Koyrs teaching during this period systematically contextualized the development of science within the history of religious and mystical thought, relativizing its positivist and progressivist fantasies by seeing it as derivative of a metaphysical and religious background.36 Later to inuence Thomas Kuhn and a wide array of European thinkers, Koyr had a controversial aura in the 1930s.37 Koyr argued that experimentation in science proves metaphysical presuppositions rather than discovering natural laws,38 and he went on to suggest that Galileos detractors had legitimate reasons for dismissing his work, because its cosmological signicance was unsubstantiated from their Aristotelian viewpoint, indeed disruptive and nihilistic. Koyr also produced a minor stir in arguing that the story of Galileos Tower of Pisa experiment was untrue, merely a positivist legend.39 This treatment of theology and mysticism as a ground for
metaphysique?, Bifur 8 ( June 1931), pp. 732. Hereafter cited as WM from the English translation in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 32. Bataille, LExistentialisme, Critique 41 (October 1950), p. 83. Bataille recounts the rejection of Corbins translation by the Nouvelle Revue Franaise (blaming Julien Benda) and argues that Corbin chose Bifur because it was not an aging journal (like Revue philosophique). 33. Chronologie, in Bataille, Romans et rcits (Paris: Pleiade, 2004), p. cvi. 34. See Alexandre Koyr, De la mystique la science: Cours, confrences et documents 19221962, ed. Pietro Redondi (Paris: EHESS, 1986), pp. 4142; Bataille, Romans et rcits, pp. civcv; and Rodolphe Gasch, System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille (Bern: Peter Lang, 1978), p. 300. 35. Batailles notes from the seminar (BNF, Fonds Bataille, 8B, 13D, and env. 16) are numerous and occasionally quite different from those used by Raymond Queneau in the publication of Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel (1947; Paris: Gallimard, 1968). The title of Kojves course, often overlooked, is central to his approach, and to the way in which he, Bataille, and Koyr often treated religious, metaphysical, and social arguments as coextensive. Bataille refers to some of the thinkers he had studied under Koyr (Nicholas of Cusa, Boehme, and so on) in his text with Raymond Queneau, Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic, in Visions of Excess, p. 109. 36. Koyr, Etudes dhistoire de la pense scientique (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 1113. See also De la mystique la science, pp. 3543. 37. See the criticisms of Koyr in Aldo Mieli, Il tricentenario dei Discorsi di Galileo Galilei, Archeion 21 (1938), p. 281, cited in De la mystique la science, p. 35; and Thomas Kuhn, Alexandre Koyr and the history of science: On an intellectual revolution, in Encounter 34, no. 1 (1970), pp. 6769. For Koyrs inuence, see the Festschrift Mlanges Alexandre Koyr, 2 vol. (Paris: Hermann, 1964); and J.-F. Stoffel, Bibliographie dAlexandre Koyr (Florence: Olschki, 2000), pp. 99127. 38. This point has led to extensive quarrels in the history of science. See Michael Segre, The NeverEnding Galileo Story, in Peter Machamer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 4035. 39. Koyr, Etudes dhistoire de la pense scientique, pp. 21323. See also De la mystique la science, pp. 3637.

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11

science is reected in Kojves foundation of philosophy on religion (and religions perpetuation via sublation), and is paramount for Batailles linking of science to repressive uniformity and his privileging the sacred over the profane. Koyr was inuential in other ways as well. In the early 1930s, he started an extensive discussion of Galileo and modern science with his former teacher Husserl.40 He sponsored the rst translations of Heidegger, introducing Corbins translation of What Is Metaphysics? and publishing, in the rst issue of Recherches philosophiques, a translation of Vom Wesen des Grundes (On the Essence of Ground)which in the French context served as an explicit critique of Kant and positivism, and which pointed to a novel conception of reality, existence, and truth. Founded in 1931 by Koyr and two colleagues from the EPHE, and later coedited with Wahl and Bachelard, Recherches philosophiques was specically geared toward an overcoming of the previous philosophical generation. It included phenomenological essays (often in translation), reviews of a range of contemporary studies, and startling debates on metaphysics and the philosophy of science.41 Among its contributors were also Raymond Aron, Georges Dumzil, Bernhard Groethuysen, Kojve, Gabriel Marcel, Sartre, and Leo Strauss, all of whom were or became major gures in their own right. Bataille contributed to the journal a rst Kojvian version of The Labyrinth, which was published right next to Levinass On Escape and an essay on Hegel by Karl Lwith.42 These gures and connections are signicant to Batailles case for a number of reasons. First, they contextualize and bear out his claim to be speaking as a philosopher. They suggest a semiacademic context in which Bataille learned about phenomenology and conversed with philosophical contemporaries whom he rarely wrote about. They also visibly inuence his work, e.g., his presentations to the Collge de sociologie, his occasional politico-philosophical treatments of science, and especially his 1943 Inner Experience. They point to a casual personal circle where he could discuss his approachat the Caf dHarcourt after Kojves seminars, with Corbin, Kojve, Auguste Queneau, Simone Weil, and sometimes also Koyr and Levinas.43 And they also locate him in an intellectual matrix, centered
40. Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, in Husserliana III: Briefwechsel Teil III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 35562. See also Franois de Gandt, Husserl et Galile (Paris: Vrin, 2004). 41. The journals role was recognized abroad, notably in a review written by Raymond Aron for the Frankfurt Schools Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung 6 (1937), pp. 41720. 42. Bataille, Le Labyrinthe, in Recherches philosophiques 5, no. 6 (1935), pp. 36472; trans. The Labyrinth in Visions of Excess, pp. 17177. Hereafter cited with references rst to the French and then to the English. The text was reprised under the same name in Inner Experience, without the rst two pages, which essentially repeat Kojves interpretation of the master-slave dialectic. See Bataille, LExprience intrieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), pp. 97110; trans. Inner Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 8192. 43. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojve (Paris: Grasset, 1990), p. 363. Regarding the nonconformist politics of this group, it is signicant to note that Kojve and Corbin translated Henri de Mans Lide socialiste (Paris: Grasset, 1935). This hardly saddles them with de Mans later pathat the time, the book had been publicly burned in Germany, and in France those favorably citing de Mans work included inuential gures like Jacques Maritain. It does, however, strongly indicate an interest on their part in unorthodox, revisionist Marxism.

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around Recherches philosophiques, that was marked by specic investments in the early Heideggerian corpus and strong rejections of Heideggers politics. Since Koyr had told Levinas of Heideggers political involvement in the early 1930s, it is unlikely that others in this group would not know about it. Intellectual Matrices and the Conceptual Foundations of Batailles Critique Three texts from the 1930s underscore Batailles politico-philosophical concerns and introduce Critique of Heidegger, clarifying some of its ambiguities: The Psychological Structure of Fascism (1933), The Labyrinth (1936), and the Dossier Htrologie (193536). a. Homogeneity (Society, Science, Metaphysics, and Sovereignty) The Psychological Structure of Fascism, Batailles classic study of fascisms claims to overcoming democracy, parallels Critique of Heidegger thematically at times even word-for-word, as in these two passages describing their shared treatment of money and social homogeneity: From the immediate life that is imposed on me rst of all as money, acquired, to be acquired, or expended, in accord with measurable acts, I do not retain here more than the form, which is to say the equivalence, established between things, acts, products, and signs of things, acts, and products. (CH, pp. 67; pp. 2829)44 The common denominator, the foundation of social homogeneity and of the activity arising from it, is money, namely the calculable equivalent of the different products of collective activity. Money serves to measure all work and makes man a function of measurable products.45 Both texts identify democracy with homogeneity (the erasure of difference and tension) and describe society as torn between authority and an opposite. In Critique of Heidegger, this opposite is anarchy, which democracy, in The Psychological Structure of Fascism, fends off through adaptation: . . . write briefly, saying that it could be shown that society is torn between authority and anarchy. Disappearance of the being of societies with democracy. (CH, p. 3; p. 27)46

44. The passage also evokes Batailles La notion de dpense, in OC I, pp. 30220; trans. The Notion of Expenditure, in Visions of Excess, pp. 11629. 45. Bataille, La structure psychologique du fascisme, p. 340; The Psychological Structure of Fascism, p. 138. 46. Bataille considers the metaphysical question of the nature of societies in numerous texts of the period, notably Rapports entre socit, organisme, tre, OC II, pp. 295, 29799.

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In practical terms, the function of the State consists of an interplay of authority and adaptation. The reduction of differences through compromise in parliamentary practice indicates all the possible complexity of the internal activity of adaptation required by homogeneity . . . depending on whether the State is democratic or despotic, the prevailing tendency will be either adaptation or authority.47 Democracys destruction of the Being of society opens up a range of problems, rst among them the opposition between sovereignty and homogeneity. Bataille does not further discuss the evocative issue of authority;48 at stake here is the sovereignty (or lack thereof) of the individual in the midst of social tension and homogenized existence. Insofar as such sovereignty is threatened by political uniformity, this is reected in scientic and metaphysical terms. Batailles claims concerning science come on the heels of contemporary philosophers and philosophers of science, notably Recherches philosophiques contributors Bachelard, Kojve, and Koyr. In his LAthisme (1931), scientic writings, and Hegel lectures,49 Kojve specically used Heideggers treatment of world to set up homogeneity as a force aiming at the erasure of mans difference from the realm in which he existsand which he unsuccessfully seeks to overcome by investing in gures of authority and metaphysical power.50 Critique of Heidegger echoes these concerns and clearly invokes (a) Heideggers approach to intentionality, scientic reduction, and the meaning of world in On the Essence of Ground, available since 1932 in Recherches philosophiques,51 and (b) Bachelards psychoanalysis of objective knowledgea set of antipositivist arguments that Bachelard saw as the theoretical consequence of Hans Reichenbachs and Werner Karl Heisenbergs indeterminisms, and which he also rst presented in Recherches philosophiques.52 Batailles use of repression in Critique of
47. Bataille, La structure psychologique du fascisme, p. 342; The Psychological Structure of Fascism, p. 139. 48. On the issue of authority, Bataille cites Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in The Psychological Structure of Fascism, p. 160. See the discussion in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in The Freudian Subject (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 270, n. 37. See also Kojves 1942 La Notion de lautorit (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 49. Kojves work on science is little known. After a dissertation on Soloviev, directed by Jaspers (Alexander Koschewnikoff, Die Religionsphilosophie Wladimir Solowjeffs, University of Heidelberg, 1926), Kojve studied for several years under Koyr and wrote Lide du dterminisme, as well as, in 1929, a mathematical and philosophical treatment of the concept of world (Zum Problem einer diskreten Welt, BNF Fonds Kojve, Boite IX). In that text, the homogeneity of space is repeatedly addressed as a philosophical and mathematical issue. Similarly, Kojve approached nitude through a mathematical conception of the innite in LAthisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 2014. See also Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel, p. 217; for Kojves studies, see De la mystique la science, pp. 2729, 4146, 5052. 50. Kojve, LAthisme, pp. 95, 10610, 12630. 51. Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, rst translated into French as De la nature de la cause, in Recherches philosophiques 1 (193132), pp. 83104; hereafter cited as EG, from the English translation On the Essence of Ground, in Pathmarks. 52. Gaston Bachelard, Noumne et microphysique, Recherches philosophiques 1 (193132), p. 55. Bachelard expanded on these issues in other reviews for Recherches philosophiques, and in his La Formation de lesprit scientique (Paris: Vrin, 1938); trans. The Formation of the Scientic Mind (Manchester: Clinamen,

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Heidegger nods to Bachelards language, rather than Freuds. Here, science is homogenizing; it tends to erase individual intention: Plane of intentionality in the world of science (indifference of the limit where science represses intention) (CH, p. 3; p. 27)53 Batailles subsequent presentation of homogeneity as a quasi-scientic issue also bleeds over into metaphysical kinds of questioning. Assuming the hostility toward positivism of gures that inuenced Bataille (Bachelard, Heidegger, Kojve, Lon Shestov), his reference to science as homogeneous can be said to carry the pejorative inection that metaphysical has for Heidegger, and heterogeneity directly parallels the nothing as Heidegger posits it in What Is Metaphysics?: science forgets that only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects of investigation (WM, p. 95). Central also to Kojves inuence on Batailles tableaux htrologiques (OC II, pp. 177204) and his Critique of Heidegger is the thought of understanding man as a being fundamentally grounded in and bound by the straitjacket of immanence, a being at least contrasted to the image of transcendence and heterogeneity (a topic that also invokes Heideggers question of authenticity). But while Kojve emphasizes the inaccessibility of the heterogeneous in atheist modernity, Bataille (with Heidegger) tends to the inaccessibility and illusion of an other to be found in society, and seeks to think man against the scientic erasure of such an other. Secular existence is homogeneous and uniform, painless and boring; as such, it is also politically impotent.54 b. Sovereignty beyond Homogeneity (An Answer to the Question: What Is Being?) Critique of Heidegger and The Labyrinth extend this issue to a problematization of the limitations of Being. Complicating the contrast of sovereignty to homogeneity, The Labyrinth argues for an alternative conception of the relationship between Being and the individual. Well in step with a large number of texts from Recherches philosophiques that seek a concrete ground for philosophical inquiry, The Labyrinth attacks sufciency and consistency as limitations in life and existence. Bataille pretends to subsume Kojves master/slave conflict; then, implicitly founding insufciency on Kojves understanding of desire, he turns it into a key to ontology from which to criticize completeness and the desire for it: At the basis of human life there exists a principle of insufciency. In isolation, each man sees the majority of others as incapable or unworthy of being. . . . The sufciency of each being is endlessly contested

2002). As mentioned already, Kojve agreed that the Heisenberg interpretation of quantum physics called for a new philosophical anthropology in his Lide du dterminisme (Paris: Livre de poche, 1990). 53. Italics mine. 54. Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel, pp. 14548.

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by every other. . . . A burst of laughter or the expression of repugnance greets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight through which my profound insufciency is betrayed. . . .55 This last sentence turns Kojves desire for recognition on its head: rather than merely show a structural failure built into desire, social existence betrays every beings ontological lackand only a radical retreat from society (a burst of laughter . . . ) can allow human life a respite, i.e., a positive acceptance of this lack. This near absolutizing of insufciency as a dimension of existence further disrupts Kojves assumption that desire only matures in its failure to confront death, in its subjection to slavery. Still, Batailles implicit target here is Heidegger: without a proclamation of insufciency as a central factor in all existence, Being is nothing but immanence reducing the individual to shared uniform sociality. This is to say that, for Bataille, Being is not something I have access to, but instead what makes me unable to fully participate in (or reduce myself to) the community made up of human others. Bataille continues: Being in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want outside of me. It is a clumsy man, still incapable of eluding the intrigues of nature, who locks being in the ego. Being in fact is found nowhere and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to be divine, at the summit of a pyramid formed by the multitude of beings, which has as its base the immensity of the simplest matter.56 Disparaged as a mystical celebration of existential breakdown,57 this relationship between Being and the individual can be better described as a codependence aiming to disrupt the harmonious immanence of secular, scientic, uniform boredom: Batailles treatment instead opens up a different ontology, for which Being is ungraspable because both my insufciency and the excessive presence of my immanence in the world require that Being be impossible to simply place or control. To approach the question of Being is not merely to pose it, but to link it to a ight from self-sufcient human reality, from Being as it presently is, from any answer to the question of Being that celebrates its reality. The Text Insofar as it echoes such treatments of homogeneity, sovereignty, Being, and tumult, Critique of Heidegger ts well in the period 193437, and uses terms
55. Bataille, Le Labyrinthe, p. 365; The Labyrinth, p. 172. 56. Ibid. 57. Gandillac concurs with Sartre that Batailles tone was reminiscent of the mystics, in Le Sicle travers, p. 255. Kojve also wrote to Bataille on September 28, 1942, that Inner Experience is certainly not worse, also not better than books by two Christian mystics he had been reading. Published in Kojve, Lettres Georges Bataille, Textures 70, no. 6, pp. 6164. See also Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, esp. chap. 1.

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largely absent from Batailles writings preceding or following this period. The text of Critique of Heidegger gives careful and clear indications of Batailles approach to three central problems: (a) the critique of Heideggers thought, (b) the discussion of fascism and Heidegger in the context of the anthropo-theological foundations of modern politics, and (c) Batailles evocation of an exit from modern reality, in terms clearly evocative of Levinass work from the period. My aim in this more analytical section is to show: rst, that Bataille credits Heidegger with permitting a sort of reenchantment of the world, i.e., with opening up a thinking unbound by the limitations of classical ontology, which reduces man to homogeneous subjectivity, and second, that Bataille also accuses Heidegger of closing this world in an illusory quest for authenticity, rather than recognizing the fundamental tumultuousness and pain of Being. In this light, Heideggers philosophy comes to resemble fascisms promise. Both seek an overcoming of bourgeois, profane limitations, but in the same gesture, show this call to be misdirected, and indeed destructive of the very otherness they purport to reveal anew. And third, it is in rejecting this call that Bataille turns, with Levinas, to seek a more radical exit from existing thought and Being. a. Bataille and Heidegger Impossibility of existing for oneselfwhich is to say: dyingHeideggerian transcendence (CH, p. 3; p. 27). This linking of death to transcendence foregrounds the two thinkers shared concern with nitude and relates this interest to their hostility to inauthentic social homogeneity. But as an explicit reference to Heidegger, it is misleading. Coming early in the text, the reference gives no indication of the signicant difference between their respective approaches to Beinga difference that concerns us here, and that ultimately explains the above quote. Whereas in Heidegger the ontological difference downplays the role of world in the appropriative contrast of Being and beings, Bataille proceeds to locate Being in contradist inct ion to both beings and the world . Here, he attacks two of Heideggers philosophical moves: rst, he turns Dasein into le moi, the ego, the I, my ego;58 second, he conceives world as single and not centered around the ego. Here, my ego is absolutely singular and formless, a sort of empty and undirected core specic to the being that I am. Clearly evocative of Husserls pure ego,59 le moi is distinct from the world and unaffected by its process of determination. As the origin of intention, le moi is also what demonstrates a/my specic beings insufciencyits failure to get satisfaction in and from the world. Batailles argument on insufficiency specifically attacks Heideggers claim that, because of
58. Throughout this essay and the translation, I have translated Batailles le moi as the ego. See footnote 6 of the translation. 59. Husserl, Ideen I (Husserliana III) (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976); trans. Ideas I (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982), 4755. See also the fourth of Husserls Cartesianische Meditationen (Husserliana I) (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973); trans. Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), 3033. By 1931, Koyr, Levinas, and G. Pfeiffer had translated Cartesian Meditations into French.

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Dasein, beings always appear manifest as a whole (EG, p. 120). The antisubjectivist critique of subjective sufciency suggested here by Batailles ego is precisely a consequence of the rejection of this wholeness. The second attack amplies the rst. In Being and Time, world plays on the ambivalence between (a) the world in general and (b) an individual Daseins world, the realm of its existence. This ambivalence can thus insist on a codependence between Dasein and the world. That is to say, it is never clear where the limits of Daseins world lie, if world specically surrounds this Dasein and, in a sense, belongs to it, or instead world merely forms the ontic domain in which Dasein nds itself.60 Instead Bataille highlights the very contrast of the world to the ego and the failure of each to comply with the demands of the other (intention versus determination, insufciency and desire versus homogeneity) (CH, pp. 9, 11, 15; pp. 3032).61 Heidegger would object to this treatment of world and Being as spatial or anthropological: World is not a mere regional title used to designate the human community as distinct from the totality of natural things; rather, world refers precisely to human beings in their relations to beings as a whole (EG, p. 120). Nevertheless, in Batailles eyes, it is Heidegger who is too Kantian, despite his critique of Kant ( EG, pp. 11519), because he emphasizes world as something encompassing men and the entirety of their relations and thus does not sufciently demarcate the world as a battleeld for the intentions and insufciency of my ego against those of others, as a realm from whose restrictive forces man continually seeks to escape (CH, p. 11; p. 30). Given that, for Bataille, Being delineates the subjects insufciency amid the interplay of ego and world, it is revealed precisely where the determination and intention of each fails to reach and dominate the other. Being is outside me, outside my formless ego, to be contrasted to me and world alike.62 In a sense, Being is what happens when the torn ego clashes with the worldand thus Being can be expressed or recognized as love, chance, tear, or tumult. Thus, moreover, Bataille can dene the ego, the world, and Being as seeking to escape from each other, as passing through each other like liquid through ones ngers (CH, p. 4; p. 27). This difference of approach is the basis of Batailles critique: because phenomenology does not adequately present this clash, it contributes to the world of homogeneity. Having already noted the totalizing aims of Heideggers Being, Bataille proceeds to criticize other concepts like intentionality, existence, and anxiety as contributing to the loss of sovereignty. For example, intention (taken from Husserl and from Heideggers On the Essence of Ground) is not specic to my individual formless ego but becomes instead what restricts and standardizes it (paraphrasing Heidegger, a restrictive but positive delimitation [EG, p. 109]). Bataille treats it as a component of the homogeneous world: In intention, the ego progressively loses its individual character and nds itself carried to a universal
60. Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 142. 61. See also Le Labyrinthe, p. 366; The Labyrinth, p. 177. 62. This approach closely recalls Heideggers use of the mine in certain sections of Division II of Being and Time.

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value that makes it escape from the strictly ego form of the ego. It is, nonetheless, only through intention that the formless ego becomes self-consciousness ( CH, p. 15; p. 32). If intention comes to terms with the world through the very process of determination that exhausts the ego, it is crucial to note that Bataille also sees in this process the advent of self-consciousness (CH, p. 9; p. 30). Self-consciousness forces homogeneity upon the pure ego, but also makes possible my interaction with the world before me, my recognition of my submission to the world and of the possibility of a ight from this world. Bataille can thus nd in Heidegger both the ground for and the limitations of an exit from standardization and material degradation. His approach to the lusterless employee (CH, p. 9; p. 30) recalls the more pejorative of Heideggers descriptions of das Man, emphasizingin terms evocative of existentialismthe need for self-consciousness that can lead to this exit. But if Heidegger helps us see the malaise, anxiety (Heideggers way out) is merely a substitute for old, noble, failed values (CH, pp. 2, 16; pp. 2526, 33), and fails to engage the tear in me and between me and the world (CH, p. 3; p. 27). It fails to emancipate the individual, it gives a false and unself-conscious aura of individuality while accepting that this life is by and large bound by and lost in society. Rather than break with the misery of homogeneity, it makes individuals believe in their own (false) transcendence. Bataille elucidates his opposition to the implications of anxiety in the coda of his 1935 The Blue of Noon, where narrator Troppmann presents a band of Hitler Youth playing music: The sight was obscene. It was terrifyingif I hadnt been blessed with exceptional composure, how could I have stood and looked at these hateful automatons as calmly as if I were facing a stone wall? Each peal of music in the night was an incantatory summons to war and murder. . . . I saw them, so near me, entranced by a longing to meet their death, hallucinated by the endless elds where they would one day advance.63 The obscene, terrifying scene can be closely identied with the picture of anxiety as well as with Critique of Heideggers reference to the rst accents of this new Being as vulgar (CH, p. 16; p. 33). It also contrasts starkly with the earlier climax, in which Troppmann and Dirty/Dorothea make love in a cemetery, emphasizing the difference between the authenticity of the musicians facing the blue of noon as they long to meet their death and Troppmanns escape into a world of sex and death. It br ings back the issue of the overt reference to Heidegger in Cr it ique of Heidegger, the impossibility of existing for oneself (CH, p. 3; p. 27). Against this rising tide of murder, Bataille insists on the very impossibility of dominating the world by existing for oneself, that is to say by looking death in the face (CH, p. 3;

63. Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel (Paris: Pauvert, 1957), p. 205; trans. The Blue of Noon (New York: Consortium, 2002), p. 126.

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p. 27).64 Turning thus against the illusory character of Heideggerian transcendence, Bataille notes in the opening of his text that it is not just anxiety, but also the tumult, and the impression of being torn that mark Being and that aid a being to become self-conscious (CH, p. 2; p. 26).65 Batailles search for a new nobility that constructs self-sovereignty in internal tumult and in the midst of external servitude demands a solitary, subjective, and social overcoming of homogeneity. Anxiety, which provides an impossible fantasy of heterogeneity in the face of death (WM, p. 89), and which fails to recognize that life is but a way of dying that maintains the subjects self-sufciency and its desire to dominate the world, underplays the subjects attempts to distance itself from the exigencies of the world. Accordingly, it is internal tumult and tear that serve as guides to the limits and meaning of Being, to the complexity of becoming self-conscious (CH, pp. 9, 15; pp. 30, 32) in homogeneity, inasmuch as they lay bare the irreducible discrepancy between ego and world, as they form the place of my self-conscious attempt at an evasion of this world. These two concepts are particularly signicant as immanent critiques of Heideggers treatment of freedom as ground (EG, p. 129), of freedom as a fundamental opening of the abyss (EG, p. 127; WM, p. 91) and as a constrictive setting of ones world (EG, p. 122). For Bataille, genuine freedom is not a condition of the possibility of existence (as in Heidegger), but what posits the ego as both torn internally and autochthonous with regard to external submission (CH, pp. 45; pp. 2728). Bataille charges Heidegger with empowering the homogeneous world by presenting people as human ready-to-hands, or tools with fantasies of authenticity, whose only experience beyond homogeneity (anxiety) can be nothing more than what reveals their life as a continuous function, rather than what reveals their existential distance from the functional role they play in society. For Bataille, once they serve no further purpose than to balance their intention with realitys expectations and demands, individuals lose their Being. Freedom is with sovereignty, with the tumult and therefore with ungraspable Being: like them, it does not mark mans everyday existence. And like them, it points out its opposition to all such existence and their status as counterpoint to what presents itself as human life that is imposed on me . . . (CH, p. 6; p. 28).

64. Bataille, Hegel, la mort et le sacrice, p. 33; Hegel, Death, and Sacrice, pp. 28687. This critique, one of the most widely shared obsessions of mid-century French literature and thought, recurs throughout the work of Levinas, Blanchot, Leiris, Kojve, Bataille, Malraux, Beckett, and others. What these texts have most in common is a question: given that the moment of looking death in the face, the experience of death, is itself impossible, what distinguishes Being-toward-death from other exceptional moments? Do we know death except through the death of others? Kojve dedicated some beautiful pages to the problem in LAthisme (pp. 12229), citing Jean Giraudouxs Amphytrion 38 (LAthisme, p. 224, n. 76). These questions are extensively addressed in Jacques Derrida, Apories: Mourirsattendre aux limites de la vrit in Le passage des frontires: autour du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galile, 1994), pp. 33436; trans. Aporias (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 7476; and Paola Marrati, Daseins Life, Genesis and Trace (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 14276. 65. This is referring to What Is Metaphysics?, pp. 8889.

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b. Democracy, Fascism, Political Anthropology Critique of Heidegger contributes further to our understanding of Batailles political ambiguity. It introduces the political problem by writing that with democracy, the Being of societies disappears (CH , p. 3; p. 27)that democracy facilitates a homogenization of society unseen in classical and other modern regimes. This involves a certain ontologism that needs to be distinguished from organicism, which Bataille repeatedly rejects.66 Emulating Heideggers according of Dasein to nonhuman entities (e.g., Volksdasein), Batailles Being of societies transcends (or sidesteps) the everyday politics involved in democratic decision making, announcing instead a role for such Being in the politics of life, capable of forming life and humanity. But in contrasting life and Being to the reduction of man to a functionpointing to what happens when life frees itself from degradation (CH, p. 2; p. 26)Bataille shows how the tear in the ego may result in an experience of freedom qua happiness in the midst of servility: In the moment when I write, I breathe with all my strength, and I breathe free. Free in the world where my submission is nevertheless required, how could [being] free have here any meaning other than happy? (CH, p. 5; p. 28). Bataille can hence imagine a role for political reality: to not reduce Being to a politically founded ontological uniformity. If the values of a nobility that exceeded ordinary life are dead (CH, p. 12; p. 31), then the way out of a decadence that Bataille unquestioningly equates with misery may lie with such new being. If Being is totally new (if Bataille accepts Heideggers claim to having dethroned traditional ontology, and the political implications of this claim), then new, different political formations can be expected. Batailles ambivalence toward fascism rests on this point: Certainly, this is a totally other way of being that is proposed to existence, and thus one should not be surprised that out of this new fermentation that enters the world and that the world had not yet made possiblethe rst accents are of an almost insurmountable acidity (CH, p. 16; p. 33). Some imaginary nonliberal politics may bring about such change, yet existing forms of fascism apparently do not see beyond use value, and the symbolism and spiritualism they invoke is but window dressing, like the fascinating and horrible Hitler Youths of The Blue of Noon. To put it differently, while fascism asserts a break with democratic, bourgeois reality, it wipes away the tumult that is fundamental to the individual, and hence destroys his Being. Fascism uses the heterogeneous it evokes to further reinstate and impose homogeneity. Batailles opening to some sort of reenchantment of the world, to a life beyond good and evil, to Being as chance, nds its hopes dashed by insurmountably acidic accents of this new fermentation. Like Heideggers philosophy, fascism invests in an imagined redemption that might conceivably found a new
66. See Batailles notes from Kojves Hegel course: la socit est donc bien un tre au sens du mot . . . mais lappeler un organisme na pas de sens (BNF Fonds Bataille, 8B, 15). This note mirrors Batailles discussions of the tre compos at the Collge de Sociologie (OC II, p. 295).

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way but does not: tumult, tear, inner division are all wiped out by fascism as weaknesses. When Bataille thus turns to advocate an exit from this politics and philosophy, his main target is modernitys secular anthropology, not democracy, which is itself too poor to understand fascism, just as pre-phenomenological thought is too limited to adequately critique Heideggers ontology. The hope that the political can construct a Being or life beyond and in contrast with political being is everpresent in Critique of Heidegger; this beyond can easily be identied with Batailles discussion of chance.67 This is why, for Bataille, Heideggers is a philosophy of fascism. Heidegger provides the foundations for a thinking that moves outside and beyond the degradation and limits of modern homogeneous reality, presumably identied here as those of inauthentic existence (das Man). Yet like fascism, he does not allow the real discrepancy between an individuals existence and his world to manifest so as to allow for genuine freedom amid servility. Heidegger thinks up an escape from the oppression of inauthenticity of modern life, but also because of his destructive illusion of authenticity and heterogeneity, he renders real escape impossible. c. Bataille and Levinas The pairing of Bataille and Levinas at rst strikes the reader as unlikely. Yet it seems they knew each other, and Bataille once cited Levinass Reections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism (1934) as the only useful piece written on Nazi ideology.68 Critique of Heidegger also shares theoretical concerns with Levinass De lvasion (On Escape, [1935]).69 In particular, their advocacy of exit (CH, p. 9; p. 30) aims beyond the traditional post-Kantian, positivist framework, while also turning against the Hegelian and Heideggerian advances, so as to insist on the failures of any philosophy that does not form, in its very foundations, the desire of the subject to escape the world in which it nds itself, the existence whose limits it must forever face. Read as a reaction to the economic and political instability of the French mid-1930s, Levinass De lvasion (published in Recherches philosophiques next to Batailles The Labyrinth) presents a quasi-romantic protest against the malaise of bourgeois modernity (E, p. 50)a demand for a ight from a society permeated by nancial disaster and its culture of sociopolitical insecurity. Politically, the

67. Bataille later noted that this hope was crushed by World War II (Sur Nietzsche, p. 124; On Nietzsche, p. 84). He rst subtitled On Nietzsche as Will to Chance, a motif he consistently identied with the escape from restricted economy. 68. Emmanuel Levinas, Quelques rexions sur la philosophie de lhitlerisme, in Levinas, Les Imprvus de lhistoire (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994), pp. 2336. Batailles reference is in Nietzsche et les fascistes, in Acphale, January 21, 1937; trans. Nietzsche and the Fascists, in Visions of Excess, pp. 19293. 69. Levinas, De lvasion in Recherches philosophiques 5 (1935-1936), pp. 37392; republished as De lvasion (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982); trans. On Escape (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), hereafter cited in the text as E. In his introduction, Jacques Rolland remarks on the afnity between Bataille and Levinas (E, p. 80) and correctly notes a rift inscribed in Being in Bataille, though he does so in terms and with conclusions that differ from the analysis given here.

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text is unremarkable, mixing reactionary modernism70 and antibourgeois nonconformism with the claims that every civilization that accepts beingwith the tragic despair it contains and the crimes it justiesmerits the name barbarian (E, p. 73), and that Western philosophy, in effect, has never gone beyond this (E, p. 51). As in Bataille, the call to escape follows from recognitions of a malaise in selfsufcient life and the bankrupt ontology justifying it. Levinas radicalizes escape to formalize the insatiable need for an escape in and from the purity of Being: while escape as such is necessary, semiempirical, philosophical, literary, and other sorts of escape are inadequate and unsatisfactory. Thus Levinas considers and puts aside: (a) Heideggers philosophy and a mysticism of Being (E, pp. 51, 54); (b) literary criticism (E, p. 52); (c) romantic aversion to lowly realities (E, p. 53); (d) escapism from the servitude imposed by the thereness of the body (E, p. 53); (e) Bergson (E, pp. 54, 70); (f) transcendental/religious solutions (E, p. 51) and claims to the innity of Being (E, p. 69). Moreover, he rejects the possibility that escape is just (g) a movement-toward, a gesture with a destination (E, pp. 5354); (h) nostalgia for death (E, p. 54); (i) a search for pleasure or intimacy (E, pp. 52, 65), ( j) creativity as imitation of the Creator (E, p. 72); or nally, (k) a thinking of nothingness (E, p. 70). Despite their character as formal indications of escape, these applications or instances are no more than indices of the existents need to exit its Being. Levinas grants this need afrmative traits: it marks the eeing from self-sufciency (E, p. 54) and thus is liable to break up our bourgeois existence (E, p. 53), which is insatiable, irreducible from the point of view of the subject (E, p. 53). Escape is excendence, the subjects movement toward transcendence amid a groundless homogenizing reality that has rendered genuine transcendence impossible and meaningless. Bataille identies with this radical sense of revolt, particularly its lack of direction or justication: The aspiration to something wholly other is stronger than the need to justify the will to ee (CH, p. 2; p. 26). Exit must emphasize improbability, indeterminacy, the failure of intention and science. Bataille again approaches phenomenology at the point where intention doubles back into itself and my presence is revealed by the failure of my intention to reach its target: Effectuation of the exit {} What happens when life frees itself from degradation. Not only anxiety, but also tumult, and the impression of being torn. The I am there: the region of I am there where existence takes place (in the existential sense). This region protects from a determination or an intention. Nevertheless, this fact distinguishes itself from intention, because it conicts with itself when achieving intentional form. Yet it cannot exist without intention. The ego is thus only revealed by intention, albeit too muchand in its development, it is further revealed by the critique of the intentionality of
70. Jeffrey Herfs term is inexactly applied, but nonetheless useful. See his Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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the ego, by the support of improbability, by a betrayal of all intentionality. (CH, pp. 23; p. 26) Insufcient being cannot bind itself to its reduced modern manifestations, cannot come to agree with a determined existence amid intentionality. In its critique of intention, this passage encounters Levinass analysis of nausea and shame (E, pts. VVI). Like Levinas, who rejects Bergsons lan vital for its formal posteriority to Heideggerian Being and its irrelevance in a world where Heidegger has come to passBataille uses Being and the ego in a manner that clearly indicates his distance from pre-Heideggerian ontology, and his critical engagement with the ontological difference. His play between my ego and the world does not allow me to escape the world, but joins this juxtaposition with a language of freedom and submission (a rhetoric Levinas never resorts to). Ego and world seek to escape from themselves and from each other: it is only the regime of determination, intention, and knowledge that rejects the possibility of such a double escape: freedom comes without a literal revoking of the worlds yoke (CH, pp. 45, 16; pp. 2728, 33). For Levinas, Being, whose introduction already looks like an escape (E, p. 57), is the proper ground on which escape becomes possible and indeed necessary: it is only the coming to pass of Heideggers thought that makes a genuine escape or excendence possible. Escape is at once a movement beyond Being and a consequence inherent in the basic structure of Beingwhich is precisely why it is virtually impossible to achieve. In other words, it too demands (at least) a double movement: a philosophical paradigm shift into Heideggerian ontology and a recognition of this ontology as a prison. Bataille would agree: like excendence, his exit involves precisely the impossibility of an opening of the strictly speaking homogeneous to heterogeneityto the sacred, etc. There are two main differences, however. First, for Bataille, exit has an empirical characterthat it is linked to intimacy, sexuality, ecstasy, expenditure, and so on. Particularly so, because unlike Levinas, Bataille sees life, the claim I live (and I sense), as indispensable, and the more his work approaches a thinking of death, the more it becomes fascinated by its recoil from death, by the perseverance of life in tumult. Batailles vitalism is not a pre-Heideggerian residue, but precisely an attempt to provide some sort of only partially empirical texture to fundamental ontology, to avoid Heideggers emphasis on the authenticating function of death in favor of a respect for laughter, ecstasy, and so onand, a step further, for sovereignty. If, in The Labyrinth, Bataille largely limits himself to a thinking of insufciency, nondiscursive existence, laughter, ecstasy resulting from divergences between concept (or project) and Being, in Critique of Heidegger, escape from Being suggests a move into a totally other conception of Being, world, and life (CH, pp. 6, 16; pp. 28, 33). The second main difference extends from the rst. Rather than rejecting instances of exit as insufcient, Bataille largely subsumes them in his call for an exit, even as he afrms that the need for exit will still be present even under different polit ical and philosophical grounds. Unlike Levinas, Cr it ique of

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Heidegger does not deny escape a certain application in the sociopolitical realm. Though at the time the options were likely to disappoint, Bataille engaged in openness to new demigods (Hitler included) as much as he formulated a reclaiming of limits of lifeecstasy and laughterfor the subject. Batailles exit is not necessarily allied to a move away from the totalizing collapse of subjectivity on the subject, but to a call for a contrast of subjectivity to the world and to heterogeneity (or claims thereto) within society and modernity. While exit does not have a necessary, manifest content, it does nonetheless claim for itself a specic terrain in and against individual desire and self-sufciency. This terrain may be that of Being as dened in Batailles conceptionBeing as outside me, outside my egoas Bataille only partly allies this modied version of the Being/beings opposition with his heterogeneity/homogeneity distinction. In an argument and a tone reminiscent of Levinass De lvasion, Batailles exit counters the phenomenological reduction and Heideggers ontological difference not by seeking to escape the social misery or existential anguish his thought shared with Heidegger, but instead by rejecting Heideggers opposition to a radical tear in existence, his advocacy of authenticity in the showdown of existence and death. Whether exit is an exit into being or even an exit from precarious Being, the crux of the Critique of Heidegger is a call to think the ontological difference differently. This attack on Heidegger is indicative of a nuanced 1930s French reading of the latters early texts, but also indicative of the two trends, existentialist and antihumanist, that the reception of Heidegger would take up in the 1940s. In Batailles text, what might be called French phenomenology accepts Heidegger as a privileged interlocutor, while objecting to what it perceives as a trend in his and Husserls thought toward a theory of formalized subjectivity insensitive to the density of individual life. Instead, for Bataille, the celebration of the clash between ego and Being establishes subjectivity, the fundamental nonequivalence between different lives, and the subjects claim to Being (CH, pp. 25, 8; pp. 2528, 2930). Batailles confusion of ontological with social and psychological categories, of Levinass need to take leave of Being with a defense of life in stiing social circumstances, is fundamental to existentialisms development. But it is also central to understanding why neither resistance originating in social causes (in Sartre) nor onto-theological kinds of escape (as in Marcels writings) would by themselves sufce for Batailles generation during the peak of existentialism in the 1940sand why this generation (Bataille above all) would emphasize its mistrust of political humanisms against existentialism and Marxism. Bataille echoes here a politics of existential rejuvenation that situates him squarely in an antidemocratic camp, yet he also snubs the claims of Heidegger and fascism to authenticity through nitude. In rejecting the primacy of the ontological difference and of Heideggers approach of Being, Bataille aims not only for a different, less politically troubled conception of Being, but also for a thinking, shared with Levinas, that upholds the possibility, or fantasy, of becoming other, of exiting, of escaping everything that still is.