In this episode we discuss the work of Georges Bataille, in particular the program for the clandestine occult organization Acéphale, a brief fragment entitled “Poetry,” and a passage on gifts and sacrifice.
Georges Bataille’s heterological non-philosophy has been deeply influential to thought, non-thought, art, and poetry in ways far too wide-ranging to account for. Indeed, trying to trace the influence of Bataille might lead one to an uncountable realm, where all such measurements break. This unaccountability might lead one back to Bataille’s own work and thinking, a delirious labyrinth of philosophy, non-philosophy, essay, sociology, poetry, fiction, and more. Though associated with the Surrealists, Bataille moved forward to produce one of the most influential and enigmatic philosophical projects of the 20th century. His Summa Atheologica and Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge stand headless before Buried Text as a challenge to our individual identities, to all useful work, to restricted economies, to the functioning of our institutions, to our ritual externalizations, to our notions of art, science, poetry, and history. There the reader finds an ultra-materialist sub-surrealism coursing through a base materiality that forever explodes inner experience just at the point where the subject seems to come into focus.
Bataille’s work has been important for the continuing transvaluation of all values. The work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Hélène Cixous, and so many others is unthinkable without Bataille, and perhaps should remain so. His work has also been influential in post-colonial thought, queer theory, feminist thought, and, of course poetics. One of the most interesting recent engagements with Bataille’s thought is Aria Dean’s “Black Bataille,” an extraordinary yoking together of afropessimist thought and Bataille’s radical l’informe. Perhaps the most forceful articulation of Bataille’s relationship to poetry would be Steve McCaffery’s influential essay, “Writing as a General Economy,” an essay that gave permission to a generation of textual excess, pure expenditure, absolute waste, and radical energetic anti-capitalist militancy that can be seen in the work of LANGUAGE, CCRU, and poets like Joyelle McSweeney and many, many more.