Performance and Mystical Experience - Bataille, Pasolini, Dumont

On (not) having one’s feet on the ground

The call for papers for this conference asked for submissions which would examine how performance, theatre, and drama might disclose the precariousness of religious and mystical experience in a world governed by instrumentality, totality, and immanence.’. Despite my intentions, I have found myself arguing in what follows against a certain version of mystical experience, which, while precarious, instantiates what I see as a specific form of instrumentality, and in favour of an alternative understanding of instrumentality. The lecture focuses on the work of Georges Bataille, among other things, in whose work one can find a sustained attention to the value of a form of mystical experience which Bataille seeks to situate on an atheological basis. No doubt there is much beyond the narrow focus of my lecture to find and to explore in Bataille’s account of mystical or inner experience, sovereignty, non-knowledge, in relation to performance and performativity, particularly in his book Inner Experience. All of this is to say that my take on this is partial. I nevertheless think it is fundamental.

The final pages of Georges Bataille’s book Eroticism, published in France in 1957 and translated by Mary Dalwood as Erotism: Death and Sensuality in 1986, position a photographic image of the ecstatic face of St Teresa of Avila on the front of the book and also within it, opposite the final pages of the ‘Preface to Madame Edwarda’, included as the seventh ‘diverse study of eroticism’, after a lecture on sanctity, eroticism and sovereignty, a review essay of a book on mysticism by Father P. Tesson, one on Lévi-Strauss and incest, one on Sade and one on Kinsey.




Saint Teresa & Madame Edwarda
Referring to the ‘author’ of Madame Edwarda in the third person, and in a footnote naming him as Pierre Angélique, Bataille does not ‘confess’ his authorship of the fictional narrative originally published in 1942. He thus maintains the complex play of textual personas that is also at work in and around Story of the Eye, his first narrative text published in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch. Thus Bataille posits a fiction, written by himself, but under a pseudonym, as a contemporary ‘case study’ of eroticism, illustrating the fundamental theses of Erotism, that sex is tied to death and to the sacred. He introduces the fiction of Madame Edwarda, after the chapter on mysticism, as a response to mysticism and an exceeding of it, and simultaneously returns us to the concerns of the 1942 book Inner Experience, which, he says elsewhere, was so closely tied to the fictional narrative Madame Edwarda that the two books had to be read together.

Bataille’s argument concerning mysticism, in the preface to Madame Edwarda, is that it goes only so far, and that its logical extension is to open up the figure of God to its own dissolution, its own ‘dépassement’ or its overcoming. This superseding or overcoming is performed in and by Madame Edwarda herself, the personification of God as a prostitute, ‘une fille publique’, like any other, who, as Marguerite Duras was to remark, one might encounter in the street someday. Bataille writes:

This is the meaning, the enormity, of this small and unreasonable book: the tale puts God himself on stage, in the fullness of his attributes. But this God, nevertheless, is a public whore, in every point similar to others. But what mysticism was not able to say (at the moment of saying it, it failed), eroticism says: God is nothing if he is not the overcoming of God in every sense: in the sense of the common being, in those of horror and impurity, finally in the sense of nothing… We cannot with impunity add the word God to language, this word that exceeds words; from the moment we do so, this word overcoming itself vertiginously destroys its limits.

God, the impossible and ineffable object of the mystic’s excessive, self-dissolving and shattering love, is ‘superseded’ in this naming of him as ‘un être vulgaire’, a common being, and then, Bataille adds, in her shattering exposure to… horror, impurity, nothing. Bataille’s intention here is to dissolve the God of the mystics in the ecstatic cry of Madame Edwarda, who, in the final pages of the narrative, the impotent narrator witnesses having sex with a taxi-driver. The preface describes this cry as follows:

Being invites itself to the terrible dance whose deep rhythm is bound to the instant of fainting [syncope], and that we have to take as it is, knowing only the horror with which it resonates. If our hearts fail us, there is nothing more tortuous. And the moment of torture has to be present: if it were not, how could we overcome it? But exposed being, being exposed to death, to torture, to joy – without reserve, being exposed and dying, suffering and happy, already appears in its veiled light: this light is divine. And the cry which this twisted mouth, this being, wants to make heard – in vain? – this cry is an immense hallelujah, lost in an endless silence. 

Through the imbrication of the fictional text’s scenario in the critical work Bataille counterposes the photographic reproduction of Bernini’s St Teresa, or to be more precise, of the image of her face, with Madame Edwarda’s cry. The halleluiah of the mystic is opened up beyond God to silence, to nothing.

Bataille’s strategy here is a deliberate, critically framed exposure of mystical experience to what elsewhere he will call non-knowledge, or sovereignty, exposed not to or towards union with the divine, but to communication with the other, with an alterity without content, for what Edwarda communicates is nothing, opens into silence.  What is significant about this strategy, however, is that it relies on and is mediated by a specific aesthetic and textual framework. On the one hand there is a specific positioning of writing and photography (a facet of Bataille’s writing since the late 1920s with Documents) in which the image stands in for a performance of jouissance which will be recouped or recovered by the text and by the writing subject. That the photograph in question is of a sculpture, albeit one whose baroque aesthetics tend towards movement in the multiple folds of Teresa’s habit, merely underlines the economy of this relation whereby movement is drained from the object to endow or to enrich the subject with a durational experience which Bataille seeks to embody in his writing. On the other hand, a fictional ‘literary’ figure is incorporated as a contemporary point of reference against the backdrop of other historical forms. Bataille’s engagement with mysticism is not a return, but intends a historical situatedness, which means it takes place in the absence of religion. Bataille’s heretical rewriting of mysticism thus has specific parameters and conditions. This is the thesis I want to explore through another example from an earlier and significant moment of Bataille’s post-war work.

Le Supplice des cent morceaux

In 1942 Georges Bataille began his book Inner Experience with the proposition that he would speak of mystical experience. In the context of the Nazi Occupation of France this was a somewhat provocative move of apolitical withdrawal and this perception was potentially behind Sartre’s criticism of Bataille in the 1943 review article ‘Un nouveau mystique?’ – ‘A New Mystic?’ -  in which the existentialist philosopher accused Bataille of focusing subjective reflection on a reified and hypostatized ‘nothing’ at the expense of reciprocal human engagement and historical agency, at a time when it seemed urgent to focus on these things. But as Amy Hollywood has pointed out in her remarkable book Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History, Bataille’s position is not as straightforward as Sartre construes it to be. Bataille responded to Sartre’s ‘philosophical’ concerns in the two further volumes of what would eventually become The Atheological Summa – the volumes entitled Guilty and On Nietzsche. The kind of mystical experience he was pursuing, he says, and of which his writing was a form of testament, was not at the same level as the ‘slow’ thought of dialectical philosophy. What was pursued was a laceration of the subject to enable a deeper or ‘major’ communication with the other. Bataille’s ‘problem’ was that this form of communication entailed the ruin of dialogic communication, of human forms of commensurate exchange, or the human ‘project’, the ruin of something that could amount to knowledge or to something like a philosophy. The ‘sovereignty’ of the subject in the instants of communication and of exposure disappears from any accounting, and is not submissible to any authority other than its own.  Moreover, if Bataille’s appeal to the immediacy of experience, in contrast to Sartrean dialectics, seems to privilege the presence and essence of an integral subject, and thus risks a potentially fascist appeal to an ahistorical essence of man, Bataille writes experience in such a way as to subvert both the ‘authenticity’ and the integrity of the experiencing subject. Inner experience undoes and ruins the subject. Humanity is essential, fundamental, only where its essence falls away vertiginously, when the ground is lacking. Experience is not a claim for presence or an appeal to an essential humanity, It is what shatters the subject, and it is this shattering of being that is for Bataille constitutive of the human. Inner experience does not amount to anything. It establishes nothing. It is non-knowledge, yet it nevertheless communicates. But there is no content to this communication. It is in Jakobsonian terms entirely phatic, opening a channel between beings in which no message is transmitted and nothing shared. Whatever is communicated is a common exposure to the commonality or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the community of exposed being, or being as exposure, expeausition.

Sovereign exposure, inner experience thus appear outside agency, save the agency of their retrospective witnessing. For Bataille does not just want loss, ruination and laceration; he wants lucidity, a lucid account in writing of the experience of laceration and exposure similar to those available in the writings of mystics such as St Teresa and Angela of Foligno. This is an aspect of his work and thought that is often overlooked, especially in those accounts of it which stress the wound, the violence, the terror, at the expense of the effort to communicate. Bataille’s thinking and writing evince a constant effort to retain a hold on the communicative framework of language and conceptual lucidity through and with the experience of sovereignty. There is in Bataille’s work a consistent pressure to bring back from the experience a sense of its significance for the human project, an instance on the human dimension of what appears beyond the human. There is other words a paradox of agency at stake – the loss of agency in the passive experience of sovereign or ‘mystical’ experience, and the retention of the agency of the lucid, conscious agent of its recording, its writing, and, potentially, its performance.

This paradox is inherent to the two terms which this conference draws together – performance and mystical experience, since the claim of experience or for experience is for the presence of the subject to that experience. It is a claim for immediacy. The claim of performance would include an iteration, thus a mediation. Experience implies that what is experienced is experienced without mediation; there is an implied passivity and absence of agency which is in tension with the agency which focuses on this experience and attends to it, in an effort to testify to it.  Inner experience is a call not to know something from the outside, in the form of objective ‘knowledge’, but to experience it ‘from the inside’, to go and see or to feel for yourself. This argument surfaces in L’Erotisme, where the narrative accounts of mystical experience are proposed as fuller and truer than those of psychiatry, which can only know and ascertain external, visual symptoms. Bataille’s claim is that objective knowledge is never enough and is potentially falsifying as long as it is not supplemented by ‘inner experience’, i.e. having the experience for yourself. You have to know it for yourself, to experience it from the inside. Be a mystic yourself.  And to this point about the inside and the outside is added another, about speed and stasis. Bataille objects to Sartre that while the philosopher (Bataille distinguishes himself as ‘not a philosopher’) tries, and fails, to grasp his thought in stasis, this failure is due to the fact that his thought is constantly in movement. He writes this about the difficulties of his thought process:

What I always saw was the dissolution of these difficulties – in movement, their rebirth under other forms, accelerating with a disastrous rapidity.

The objective account of knowledge – epistemology – arrests thought. It is as static as what it observes. The experience of thought, experience as such, is in movement and in process. Forms dissolve into one another with a ‘disastrous rapidity’. Bataille’s encounter with Sartre and his argument with him thus rests on a Bergsonian argument about the distinction between the abstraction inherent in the static instant, such as might be captured in the photograph, and the truer and more intuitive experience of subjective duration.

It is telling, and ironic, then, that in his attempt to pursue the kind of experience that mystics such as Angela of Foligno or Teresa of Avila would have focused in their minds on the image of Christ, Bataille has recourse to photographs, or more precisely to photogramatic records of ‘upsetting events’, both in Inner Experience and in The Tears of Eros. Bataille’s attention to mystical experience, which he intends to rewrite as inner experience has a specific trajectory which places it in history and imbricates it with technology. The form of mystical experience Bataille has in mind in Inner Experience divests the pretexts of the religious mystics such as Angela de Foligno of the confessional and dogmatic trappings to which Christian doctrine submitted them, yet intends no less an experience beyond the limits of discursive and dialectical exchange, an experience which is oriented towards a form of communication in which the subject is exposed beyond its limits and thus attains the point of sovereignty, a point at which major communication is possible. For Bataille this experience nevertheless involves an element of dramatization, an attention to something outside the subject which itself represents, dramatizes, or performs the exposure of the subject. Bataille’s ‘method of meditation’ in these writings is to fix his attention on representations of horror, eroticism, which dramatize the exposure of the subject beyond themselves. It remains a method, a process which is enacted, albeit in the stillness of visual or internal contemplation. The dramatization is of that element in the other where they are exposed, their wound, and Bataille focuses it in this instance on the photographic image of a Chinese man undergoing the Supplice des cent morceaux, historical images from the beginning of the century which he later says as we will see he had seen in George Dumas’s Traité de psychologie, and of which he possessed one, given to him by his psychoanalyst Adrien Borel.

In Inner Experience Bataille writes:

In any case, we can only project the object-point by drama. I had recourse to upsetting images. In particular, I would gaze at the photographic image – or sometimes the memory I have of it – of a Chinese man who must have been tortured in my lifetime. Of this torture, I had had in the past a series of successive representations. In the end, the patient writhed, his chest flayed, arms and legs cut off at the elbows and at the knees. His hair standing on end, hideous, haggard, striped with blood, beautiful as a wasp.

The young and seductive Chinese man of whom I have spoken, left to the work of the executioner – I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin.

Bataille’s ‘version’ of mystical experience is resolutely atheological. Rather than focusing the exposure of the subject onto the ineffable presence of God, it focuses on a 20^th-century image, photographically reproduced, of extreme pain and suffering, of excess. The image itself does not appear in the book Inner Experience. Inner experience works here as an exposure to the suffering of the other, a ruination of the self as a discontinuous and distinct entity.  But what is also significant here is the object of Bataille’s meditation is a technologically produced image, a photograph, which thus depends on aesthetic conventions and a global commerce of images, a regime of the visible and a technology of the observer which Bataille occludes from his writing at this point. Furthermore, following the phenomenology of Bataille’s attention, he mentions the photograph or the image of it in order to reconstruct in his visual memory a process. The photograph appears as a photogram, part of a series of images as if extracted from a film-strip, which themselves relate to the durational process of the torture towards its ‘end’. Bataille’s attention moves upwards from the (absent) arms and legs towards the head and the hair, and the ‘beauty’ of the victim. While he is at pains to point out that he has seen a sequence of five images of the torture, thus that his vision of it tends towards a cinematographic image in movement, its basis remains nonetheless tied to the instantaneous arrest of the photograph. The ‘disastrous rapidity’ of experiential thought flows, in this dynamic, onto the side of the witnessing subject, while it is drained from the object, thus establishing an asymmetrical relationship, one in which communication is decidedly unbalanced. The experience is on the side of the contemplating subject; the dramatization, the performance, is on the side of the object, while the experience opens the limits, theoretically, between subject and object, and allows for the communication intended.

Furthermore, if in Inner Experience Bataille deflects the accusation that what he is seeking in this photograph is the Sadean pleasure of the vicarious witnessing of the jouissance of the other, in order to propose that what he sought in it was the ruination, the overcoming of what in him is opposed to ruin, a different configuration comes to light, however, in The Tears of Eros, written almost twenty years later. In the final chapter of this lavishly illustrated book Bataille seeks to established the social value of a conscious and lucid awareness of eroticism, as opposed on the one hand to the violent combat of war, and the feeling of moral and social collapse, on the other. Bataille seeks again a consciousness of excess and of subjective dissolution, since ‘what is conscious is not human’. Conscious then of his inability to accede to a view of the whole, to everything, to know how things will turn out and how they have got to this point in history, since the movement of history deprives him of such a totalizing vision, Bataille proposes two contemporary figures. Those who lived through them, he says, were not conscious of what they were experiencing. He proposes to represent what they were experiencing to himself, ‘with care’, focusing on the moment when their images were photographically fixed. Again we see that Bataille’s meditative practice depends on the technology of light and chemicals. The first image is that of a voodoo sacrificer, the second that of the victim of the Chinese practice of the death by a thousand cuts. This time, perhaps in keeping with the iconographic nature of the book he was preparing, Bataille tells us that one of the photographs, of which five are reproduced in the Tears of Eros, was reproduced in George Dumas’ Traité de psychologie in 1923. Bataille reports further that his psychoanalyst Dr Adrien Borel had given him one of these images and that he had been in possession of it since 1925. He says he has not ceased being obsessed by the image and that it had a decisive role in his life. Although Jerome Bourgon has proposed that the comments I will cite below are not those of Bataille, and were inserted by the editor of The Tears of Eros as Bataille’s health was failing, I find this argument unconvincing and thus propose to read what follows as Bataille’s own words:

The world linked to the exposed image of the tortured man, photographed at the time of his torture at several instants, in Peking, is, to my knowledge, the most agonizing of those which are accessible to us as images fixed by light. The torture represented is that of the Thousand Cuts, reserved for the most serious crimes. One of these images was reproduced, in 1923, in the Treatise on Psychology by Georges Dumas. But the author wrongly attributes it to an anterior date and refers to it in order to give an example of horripilation: when the hair stands on end. I am led to think that in order to prolong the torture, the condemned man was given a dose of opium. Dumas insists on the ecstatic appearance of the victim’s face. It is very evident that there is an undeniable facet of the man’s appearance, linked to the opium, which adds to the agonizing nature of the photograph. Snce 1925 I have had one of these images in my possession. It wads given to me by Dr Borel, one of the first French psychoanalysts. This image has had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable. I imagine what the Marquis de Sade would have made of this image, without having been able to be present at this sort of scene, which he dreamed of but which was inaccessible for him. He would have had this image present before his eyes in one way or another. But Sade would have wanted to see it in solitude, at least in relative solitude, without which an ecstatic and voluptuous usage is inconceivable. Much later, in 1938, a friend initiated me into the practice of yoga. It was on this occasion that I discerned, in this image, an infinite value of overturning. I cannot propose a more insane and awful violence than that which I get to if I start from this image. I was so overcome I reached ecstasy. My point here is to illustrate a fundamental link: that of religious ecstasy and eroticism – and sadism in particular. From the most unacceptable to the highest. This book is not included in the limited experience which is that of all men.

Between his own eyes and the photograph itself, Bataille introduces the mediating channel, as it were, of Sade’s gaze. Despite the previous notation that there was nothing Sadean in his contemplation of the image and his ‘love’ of the ‘young and seductive victim’, it is as if Bataille cannot help admitting to the contamination of the lacerating vision of the death and pain of the other by the risk of ‘Sadean’ pleasure, Sadean jouissance. Exposure to ruin, or the ruination of that which is opposed to ruin, in the terms of Inner Experience, cannot restrict itself to the affect of sympathy with the suffering of the other, but must also be an exposure to the yield of jouissance that comes from the spectacle of the suffering or ecstatic other. Bataille underlines this in The Tears of Eros when he says: ‘My concern here is to illustrate a fundamental link between religious ecstasy and eroticism, in particular that of sadism.’ Sovereign exposure, non-knowledge cannot separate itself from inhuman cruelty.

My point here is that Bataille’s meditative practice, which relies on the contemplation of photographic images, positions him on the side of the passive, observer of horror or ecstasy, who recoups or recuperates the experience – whether mystical or Sadean - of the ecstatic or suffering performance of the other. The performance is always that of the other, and, widened to a geo-political domain, of the suffering other, the disenfranchised bare life of global biopolitics, to put it in terms familiar to readers of Giorgio Agamben. To this extent it is an anti-performance, since it splits subjective agency and performance into the two sides of an assymetrical division and freezes experience in the speculative subject, on the one hand, and the reified other, on the other. My wider contention is that Bataille’s post-war work sees the emergence of an increasing dualism of the subject of experience, on one side, and the represented, sacrificial object, on the other. Experience and performance are split from one another, justifying Sartre’s critique that Bataille’s inner experience privileges subjective contemplation – of nothing in particular - over performative action, over agency in the world. Bataille’s pre-war work, on the other hand, in which mystical experience does not figure extensively in this explicit form, sees an emphasis on the act, on the performance of the subject, while this subject is elided in favour of an emphasis on the body. Bataille’s body fades from his post-war work as the subject of experience, albeit one on its way to ruination, is promoted. And my further contention is that this pattern sees a corresponding emphasis on the face and on the aesthetics of the ecstatic face in the post-war work, while in the pre-war work one sees a corresponding emphasis on the agency and performance of hands, and feet. The manual recedes to give way to the facial. The face as the object of contemplation is promoted at the expense, cruelly ironic in the case of the Torture of the Thousand Cuts, of hands and feet as the mediators of performance and of the act.

This split between the witnessing subject of experience and the agent of a moving performance, whose pain or ecstasy is recuperated as jouissance by the subject is reproduced in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, whose setting in the last days of Italian fascism is indicative of the biopolitical implications of Pasolini’s rendering of Sade, and, through my argument, of Bataille’s ’new mysticism’.

Pasolini, moreover, draws attention to the technologies of the observation which separate the voyeur from the victim, doubling the cinematic apparatus within the frame through the spyglass wielded by the libertine through which the final horrors are observed, and suggesting the complicity between this visual apparatus and the geopolitics of sovereignty vis a vis bare life. Here I again draw close to the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose seminal book Homo sacer: Sovereignty and Bare Life articulates a critical assessment of Bataille’s thought along similar lines. Agamben’s criticism of Bataille, of which we can find a partial parallel in the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, to which I will return, is, broadly, that the fundamental reliance on the anthropological scene of sacrifice and the ‘circle of the sacred’ creates a blindness on Bataille’s part to the geopolitical and biopolitical implications of his notion of sovereignty. For Agamben, political sovereigny is imbricated with the coercive identification of a portion of humanity who may not be sacrificed, but who may be killed with impunity, a grouping which, after Walter Benjamin, he calls ‘bare life’, la vida nuda. Sovereignty, which for Agamben is equivalent to the authority of Law, depends on this concomitant zone in which a life without form emerges. Bataille’s implicit reliance on the French sociological tradition – the work of Durkheim and Mauss, in particular – masks the political and legal reality of sovereign power with the inner experience of the sacred; Bataille’s sovereign subject misconstrues bare life as his own inner experience and thus misses the political dimensions of sovereignty. We can see this schema at work in Bataille’s accounts of the Supplice des cent morceaux, which are structured by his rewriting of mysticism. In order for Bataille to accede to the ‘mystical’ or inner experience which he pursues, he has recourse to ‘dramatizations’, so as to open himself to communication with the other. This dramatization hinges on a photograph of an oriental other whose ‘life’ emerges at the limit of consciousness, yes, but who is the process of undergoing the most drawn out of legally sanctioned punishments, promoted as a public spectacle, the photographic records of which were trafficked in the West as quasi-pornographic and orientalist phantasmagoria and subsequently lodged in academic treatises on psychology (the work of Georges Dumas), ethnographic museums (the Musée de l’Homme) or luxury coffee table art books (The Tears of Eros).

Pasolini’s Salò, and particularly its final scene, merely draws this point out, confronting the viewer with the imbrication of their viewing position and their jouissance of the pain of the other, with the politics of fascism. SLIDE 8 And this argument is more telling in The Tears of Eros, in which Bataille seems to introduce the images of the Supplice as one of two photographic instances of excess, of the ‘accursed share’, offered to the contemporary consciousness as an alternative to other forms – to war, on the one hand (this is in 1962 amidst the Cuban missile crisis and the apogee of the Cold War) and the moral collapse (‘déchéance’) of humanity on the other. Bataille argues that the vicissitudes of human history are beyond him, beyond any grasp (thus against Sartre’s dialectical vision of human history in Critique de la raison dialectique, partially published in 1960), and that the best, or the worst, he can do, is to focus attention on these images of human suffering and excess – a voodoo sacrifice on the one hand, and the torture of a Chinese man from 60 years earlier, on the other. That this is Bataille’s almost final word casts in my view a shadow over his post-war work.

The dissection of the Chinese man in the photographs of the Supplice, the amputation of the hands and feet  is cruelly indicative of the asymmetrical exchange going on here, just as, in Pasolini’s Salò, the dissection of the victim’s tongue, seen through the spyglass, suggests the brutal termination of voice and articulation to the profit of the libertine’s discursive and visual enjoyment. Bataille’s meditation on the supplice deprives his object of agency, of the capacity to perform in any way other than facially, in faciality, a move paralleled in the closing of the frame to Teresa’s face in Bataille’s illustrations, occluding the performance of her body in Bernini’s sculpture. In my terms, faciality is an anti-performance, it is a fixation, a fixative, a territorialization, a stratification. Deleuze and Guattari argue against the face and against facialization. We need to turn the face into a body. Turn the face of God into a scatological body, for example.

Bataille’s post-war work, particularly in its iconographic moments, facializes, and there is no counter-movement of defacialization, corporealizing the face through its materialization. This is particularly acute, given the contrast with the orientation, ambivalent still, of Bataille’s pre-war work towards less fixed, more mobile forms of bodily performance.

As a transition to a discussion of some performative motifs in Bataille’s pre-war work I want to look at two other instances of performance associated with mystical experience, which re-introduce the body and its movement.

Two Levitations

In Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem the maid Maria returns to her native village to sit wordlessly by the wall of a courtyard building, as an increasingly populous crowd gathers at some distance. She refuses any food other than nettles gathered from the fields.  A sudden transition between sequences reveals her hovering several metres above the roof of the building. In a subsequent sequence she has descended and accompanies an older woman, played by Pasolini’s mother, to a building site, where she requests that she be buried, saying that she will become a spring.

Her initial return to the village is prompted, one assumes, by her encounter with the (divine) visitor, played by Terence Stamp.

Maria’s initial response to him is decidedly carnal, prompting an attempted suicide attempt on her part out of the shame her fleshly desire provokes, followed by a sexual offering that the guest respectfully declines.

In Bruno Dumont’s film L’humanité, Pharaon de Winter is a police lieutenant in the village of Bailleul in Northern France, the setting of the majority of Dumont’s films up to now. De Winter is investigating the brutal rape and murder of a young girl. He has a markedly tactile and empathetic sensibility and rather inhibited tonal and social capacities which could easily be mistaken for a form of idiocy; he is also a keen allotment gardener. It is on one occasion when he is tending the flowers in his garden and gazing meditatively out at the uninspiring landscape of the northern French countryside that we are confronted as viewers with what appears to be the image of Pharaon floating several feet above the ground.

This is in the context of a film which aside from this sole image is brutally and monotonously realist. Later in the film, when it emerges that Pharaon’s best friend Joseph, the boyfriend of Domino who he is love with, is the perpetrator of the crime, Pharaon’s sanctity is confirmed and reiterated as he takes Joseph’s place in handcuffs, having just previously ‘incorporated’ the sins of the rapist and murderer in an extended mouth to mouth kiss.

What kind of performance are these levitations? The bodies ascend vertically, not through their own volition – they do not jump – or as provoked by another agent, but ‘as if’ through the agency of the grace which inhabits them, which they embody. Grace moves against gravity. Up/down. The performance here is not of an agent moving under its own volition, nor of the cause and effect of one body on another, but of what we could call a non-agental state.

Like Bataille, Pasolini’s film evinces a firm sense of the continuity of eroticism and the sacred. While the divine visitor wreaks various kinds of havoc on the other members of the affluent bourgeois family, the effect of his intervention on the maid is to induce a mystical experience of sorts; she becomes saintly. The performance of mystical experience, here levitation, is provoked by the intervention of a divine figure, but one whose divinity is decidedly carnal, or ambivalently diabolical. Each member of the family is led to seek out a different destiny from the one ordained to them by the orthodox roles of class society, to embark upon a performance somehow in keeping with their previous role, but extending it, taking it beyond limits. Thus the maid pursues her religiosity into saintliness, levitation and ultimately martyrdom, as she asks to be buried alive in order to become a spring beneath the construction site of the new post-war Italy.

If Pasolini starts to break down the split, in Bataille’s post-war writing, between the subject of mystical experience and the performing object, he does not perhaps, take it as far as to re-invent a subject for whom performance and experience would coincide, since the schema still depends on the intervention of the mysterious stranger whom Pasolini intends as a personification of something outside the human – something between the angelic and the diabolical. Nevertheless, the angel/devil prompts Maria to realize her destiny in a far more productive way than any of the other members of the family, who embark on more destructive trajectories.

Neither Pasolini nor Dumont allow us to believe that the levitation is explicitly the expression of a divine agency. That the bodies are lifted by the hand of God. Both bodies levitate through the anti-gravitational force of the grace that inhabits them.

This grace, moreover, is not explicitly situated as transcendental, an intervention from outside the material realm.  It arises from the material, from the carnal, and in Dumont, from the very abjection of the flesh, the animality of the human. Dumont’s films, and the character of Pharaon in particular, evince a powerful sense of sympathy, or empathy, which in Bataillean language we can call communication, with and for the flesh in all its carnal, sexual, animal embodiment. The levitation is not in opposition to the ‘fall’ of the flesh, but is on the contrary a principle of ascension inherent in the material. 

Despite the removal of any explicitly transcendental motif in Pasolini and Dumont there remains a fundamentally Christian or pre-Christian, perhaps, phenomenology of space in their aesthetics. Up is good, down is bad. Things take place between heaven and earth in a very literal sense. In another scene of L’humanité, in the narrative sequence immediately following his encounter with the body of the murdered girl, Pharaon is framed face down in the mud.

As if he wants to listen to the earth which has witnessed the murder of the girl, and to empathise with it. Later he will gaze for several minutes at a plough while listening to Scarlatti on his car stereo. We will encounter this tension between the sacred and the earthly and the image of penetration of the soil later. The shot of Pharaon’s face pressed into the mud expresses, I think, Pharaon’s sympathy for the earth, but also an incapacity to merge, to sink into the ground, the difference of the human from nature, due to the human pretension to verticality. Pharaon and Domino are often pictured with their eyes turned upwards to the sky as if in search of answers – which do not come – to the abjection and evil of their fellow humans. Despite its realist orientation L’humanité takes place very much between heaven and earth, and is conditioned by the opposition between them.

Bataille’s pre-war work scrambles this implicit morality of space through the alteration of this orthodox phenomenology in which gravity – the fall and weight of a body downwards – is primary, and in particular as we will see through the motif of a ‘fall upwards’ in which the ground ceases to operate as the point of reference. It introduces what I will call a heterological dialectic which supersedes the opposition of high and low, up and down, in a wider framework in which all forms ‘circulate’ and alter each other. In the remainder of this lecture I want to attend to some instances of this.

Falling Upwards

Towards the end of the novel Blue of Noon, written in the mid-1930s but not published until 1957, the narrator Troppman and Dirty have sex in a graveyard, on a cliffside overhanging a cemetery. It is near Triers, Marx’s birthplace, on the Day of the Dead, 1^st November. Troppman and Dirty go for a walk in the valley of the Moselle. They come to a place where any abyss opens up in front of them. There is a mirroring effect between the cemetery of tombs each bearing candle flames, a tradition of the time and place, and the starry sky above. The ground appears as the double of the night sky.

At a turn in the path an abyss opened in front of us. Strangely, this void was no less limitless, at our feet, than a starry sky above our heads. A multitude of little lights, flickering in the wind, were leading an unintelligible and silent dance in the night. These stars, these candles, were a hundredfold of flames on the ground: the ground on which the illuminated tombs were aligned. I took Dorothea by the arm. We were fascinated by this crowd of funereal stars. Dorothea came closer to me. She kissed me for a long time on the mouth. She wrapped herself around me, holding me violently tight: it was a long time since she had let herself go like this. Hastily we took the few steps lovers take on the ploughed earth. We were still above the tombs. Dorothea opened her dress, I stripped her to her naked sex and she herself took my clothes off. We fell onto the loose soil and I thrust into her humid body like a well-maneuvered plough penetrates the earth. The earth, beneath this body, was open like a tomb, her naked sex opened itself to me like a freshly-dug tomb. We were stupefied, making love above a cemetery of stars. Each of the little lights indicated a skeleton in a grave, they therefore formed a twinkling sky, as troubling as the movements of our fused bodies. […] I stopped, I lay on her without moving, I was gasping like a dog. Suddenly I put my hands around her. I let myself fall on her with all my weight. She gave a terrible scream. I clenched my teeth with all my strength. Just then, we started sliding down the sloping earth. There was a bit of overhanging rock further down. If I had not stopped our slide with a movement of my foot, we would have fallen into the night, and I would have believed, in wonder, that we were falling into the void of the sky.

The fall is occasioned by the weight of Troppman’s body as he lies on top of Dirty, imagining that he is penetrating the soil, which is ‘open like a tomb’. But this fall, because of the doubling effect, is imagined and experienced as a fall upwards, into the empty sky. Groundedness is relativized, abandoned even, by the ambivalent motif of the fall, which, through the doubling effect, is both downward and upward. Gravity, weight, which pushes Troppman down, in to the soil, and Dirty beneath him, provokes a slide downward, and then, virtually a fall upwards, were it not for a hook, which stops them sliding into the abyss. What disappears here is the upright posture and position of having one’s feet on the ground, and this relativization of the assumption of having one’s feet on the ground appears earlier in the novel, as Troppman stands half immersed in the sea on the beach at Barcelona:

Standing up, I had water up to my stomach. I could see my yellowish legs in the water, my two feet in the sand, my torso, arms and head above the water. I had the ironic curiosity of seeing myself, of seeing what it was, at the surface of the water, of the earth, this nearly naked character waiting for an aeroplane to come out of the sky in a few hours time.

The upright body, in Bataille’s analysis, is subjected to forces of collapse, of descent, and of ascension, a tendency towards base matter, into the ground, to sink or to be immersed, and a vertical, ascendant vector, towards the heavens,

But this Manichean, Christian dichotomy, which we see at work in Dumont and Pasolini, is undermined, altered, subverted in Bataille’s early work. It is not a question of inversion, a reversal in which down is up and up is down, but a subversion of the opposition itself, in which down and up are identical, or superimposed, and opposed to groundedness. Having one’s feet on the ground and the upright posture associated with it is a repression of the transgressive tendency to collapse or towards the vertical, and it is this transgression of normative and productive human posture, the posture of action and agency, which Bataille proposes. It is the element excessive of normative humanity which is itself constitutive of the human in his sense.

Big Toe

While his later meditations on inner experience establish as I have shown a dynamic which freezes performative moment in the contemplation of the ecstatic face, Bataille’s earlier work privileged bodily movement and indeed proposes a heretical framework which is rigorously corporeal and material. His essay on the Big Toe for the review Documents in November 1929 is an explicit instance of this mode of writing of which the strategic intention is to alter the orthodox framework and knowledge of human behavior. In contrast to the surrealist mode, which ultimately proposes the unity of contradictions in a higher reality, Bataille proposes a heterology, an alteration of the grounds of knowledge, in this case through a methodical re-ordering of the understanding of human posture and movement. Bataille’s critical target here is the ideology which understands the human in terms of elevation.

Although within the body blood flows in equal quantities from high to low and from low to high, there is a bias in favor of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation.

This privileging of the ascendant is nevertheless an ‘indelible conception’, as Bataille puts it, which posits the low, and thus the foot, and the mud in which it sinks, as ‘ignoble’. Human life, Bataille posits, is construed, with rage, as a ‘back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal’. This explains, Bataille argues, the rage directed against the foot as a ‘base organ’, and the horror that contact with it has historically occasioned.  The tendency and desire for elevation are brought savagely down to earth by the foot, and by is extremity, the big toe, whose differentiation from the other toes makes it, ironically, the most ‘human’ part of the body, and makes it the condition of possibility of man’s elevation, his upright posture.  So while Bataille recognizes the ‘indelible conception’ which arranges human space according to the moral laws of up and down, high and low, he proposes that this framework is historically and morally contingent and seeks to alter it, to point to its contingency, to trouble it, in such a way as to show the imbrication of up with down, of the high with the low, and to ruin the possibility of any ground. This is what happens here:

Since by its physical attitude the human race distances itself as much as it can from terrestrial mud – whereas a spasmodic laugh carries joy to its summit each time its purest flight land’s man’s own arrogance spread-eagled in the mud – one can imagine that a toe – always more or less damaged and humiliating – is psychologically analogous to the brutal fall of a man, in other words to death.

The toe is ‘psychologically analogous’ to a fall. Bataille brings together a Nietzschean relativization of moral categories with a Freudian symptomatology. The ground of the ground, so to speak, slips away, in this re-ordering of the shape and structure of things according to the slippage from one to another, one into the other.  

Bataille extends his enquiry by attending to what he sees a two forms of seduction – that focused on ‘exalted aspirations’, on the one hand, which the big toe is not calculated to satisfy, and, on the other hand, the seduction which attaches itself to the most ‘ignoble’ element of the most ‘ideal’ or elevated of conceptions. Thus the example of the Count of Villamediana who burnt his own house down so he could touch the foot of the Queen:

If one chooses for example the case of the count of Villamediana, one can affirm that the pleasure he derived from touching the queen’s foot specifically derived from the ugliness and infection represented by the baseness of the foot, in practice by the most deformed feet. Thus, supposing that the queen’s foot was perfectly pretty, it still derived its sacriligeous charm from deformed and muddy feet. Since a queen is a priori a more ideal and ethereal being than any other, it was human to the point of laceration to touch what was in fact not very different from the stinking foot of a thug. Here one submits to a seduction radically opposed to that caused by light and ideal beauty; the two orders of seduction are often confused because a person constantly moves from one to the other, and, given this back and forth movement, whether it finds its end in one direction or the other, seduction is all the more acute when the movement is more brutal.

Base seduction is thus attracted to the base by virtue of its distance from the high and the movement that connects them is the brutality of a fall. In Bataille’s heterology it is not the elevated and the low, in themselves, that function as basic principles, but the movement between them, ‘this back and forth movement’, which connects them and makes them – the high and the low  - the transcendent and the material – equivalent according to the terms of a different dialectic, that of the fall, more or less brutal, more or less extreme. The fall is not from high to low, but is an oscillation, a slippage from one to the other, and back again.

Solar Anus

In Bataille’s heretical cosmology, announced in ‘The Solar Anus’, written in 1928, and a programmatic text which determines in my view the entirety of his work,  the principle of gravity is displaced by a principle of alteration in which things are differentially affected by their contradictory opposites, or by anything with which they are associated. The ‘grounding’ principle of Bataille’s thought then is not the ground, or its correlates, substance, or its elevated counterpart the heavens – but what, in this inaugural proposition, he calls parody:

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

The ground is thus subjected to an alternation and a displacement such that it opens up contingencies in orthodox epistemologies and phenomenologies:

And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile centre, then a car, a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.

The circulation of the globe is tied in here with the motif of the fall:

A man gets up as brusquely as a spectre from a coffin and falls in the same way. He gets up a few hours later and then he falls again, and the same thing happens every day: this great coitus with the celestial atmosphere is regulated by the terrestrial rotation around the sun.

A fall is not, in this schema, attributed to the principles of the ascendant to and to gravity, but to circulation.  The fall is a displacement, a rotation, a performance. Performance does not take place within the phenomenological space arranged between high and low, down and up, in which to fall is always because of the weight of the body downward, but in the virtual space of this circulation or parody of forms, in which the fall is a displacement, an alteration, potentially a flight.