Bataille Escribe Sobre Heidegger

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The Anthropology of Exit: Batailleon Heidegger and Fascism*

STEFANOS GEROULANOS

OCTOBER 117, Summer 2006, pp. 324. 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To critique Martin Heidegger is a difficult operation. It means that oneaccepts at least the bulk of Heideggers conception of Being and wants to push thisconception further. To some extent it means that one wants to rethink Heideggersontological difference, to radicalize his antisubjectivism, and to escape from thelimitations of his worldview. And, politically, it can also mean that one wants toevade or go beyond Heideggers Nazism, beyond the philosophical anthropologythat his political theology entailed, beyond the stigma associated with it. I want todemonstrate that in the mid-1930s, Georges Bataille did exactly this.

At some point in the period 193437, Bataille scribbled some twenty 13.5 by21 cm pages that he titled La Critique de Heidegger: Critique dune philosophie dufascisme.1 He collated these pages onto larger, thinner sheets, corrected them, andmarked them as an appendix, but did not attach them to another text.2At stake inthis draft is a number of issues paramount to our understanding of Batailles contri-

bution to interwar thought. Here, Bataille joins a spiritual exercise aiming to undosocial homogeneity with an ontological, anti-Hegelian appreciation of insufficiencyand 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 con-tent with discrediting nonphenomenological interpretations of contemporarypolitics, 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 Rabinbachfor their help throughout; Guillaume Fau of the Bibliothque Nationale de France for his help at theFonds Bataille; and Jeroen Gerrits, Nils Schott, Martin Shuster, and Joyce Tsai who helped me toimprove and clarify the final 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 first to the BNFs pagination, then to the present editions. Citations of Batailles text aregiven 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 specific to this peri-od, as I will try to show, but the relatively clear script looks like that of Batailles other texts and lettersfrom the same period, whereas his wartime and postwar handwriting is more fluid and harder to deci-pher. In the Fonds Bataille, the manuscript of Critique of Heidegger is filed with the proofs of the1952 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 filing is purposeful.


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4 OCTOBER

profane uniformity. Though Bataille flirts quite openly with fascism, for the first andperhaps only time he also explicitlyadvocates an exit from homogeneity, indicatingthat 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 hisphilosophical writingsand whose name in this text he mentions only twice (oneof these instances being in the title). Nevertheless, he subtly takes notions likeBeing, the pure ego, and intention as starting points for an interrogation ofmodernity. He then turns against them to decry the phenomenological mondede lhomognit as stranded in the very immanence it conceptualizes. Incapableof recognizing the worlds genuine allure and real misery, dependent on andsymptomatic of hollow social and theologico-political demands, Heideggerianphenomenology 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 ofHeidegger historically, seeking to consider the two philosophers relations to fas-cism and explain how Bataille understood and criticized Heideggers thoughtinparticular why he picked Heidegger as representative of fascism.

Bataille and Fascism

The association of Bataille with fascism has been a matter of considerabledebate, most of it pointing to his peculiar role in antifascist milieux. This is not theplace to retrace or replay that debate; still, the problem is significant, because

Batailles political equivocation sets up his analysis and colors his identification ofHeidegger with fascism. To quote Zeev Sternhell, fascism had a fascination for men . . .for whom any attempt to transcend bourgeois mediocrity and democratic flacciditywas highly praiseworthy.3 That Bataille shared this fascination has given much ammu-nition to Batailles detractors, who argue that his nonconformism played an activerole in the delegitimation of the Third Republic.4 Some contemporary cultural histo-rians have echoed Jean-Paul Sartre and other critics in arguing that Bataillesphilosophical anthropology relied on a strategy of (a) articulating human experienceon the basis of vitalist or mystical postulates, and (b) providing a consequent critiqueof bourgeois secularism (a critique ex definitionehostile to liberal democracy andsocialist utopia) that rivaled fascism in its reactionary aims and substance. Some fur-ther argue that Batailles claims on heterogeneity evince a hidden pro-Nazism that issupposedly part and parcel of postwar critiques of liberal humanism.5

3. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity 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


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Supporters respond that Bataille never collaborated with the occupiers andthat his fascination with fascisms aestheticized and sacralized politics by no meansamounted to support for a Nazi takeover. They point to the sobriety with which hedescribed fascisms capacities,6 to his defense of Nietzsche against Nazi appropria-

tion,7

and to his heated rejections of the French radical right in Contre-Attaqueandin his own notes.8 Indeed, Bataille did not resemble French fascists: he was nonationalist, no anti-Semite, no antimaterialist (a vitalistquasupermaterialist if any-thing), and hardly a supporter of moral rejuvenation. He did not move in fascistmilieux, like Marcel Dat, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, or Robert Brasillach. For hismore careful defenders, this ambiguous investment points first of all to the failureof the democratic imaginary in the 1930s, but also marks Batailles attempt toimagine modernity as a tragic clash between classical rationality and an inner,unruly, excessive humanity. Unlesskept in suspension, such a clash leads to abdica-tions of sovereignty in favor of fascist projects,9 yet such suspension also leavesBataille open to charges of antifascist fascism, superfascism,10 even an arche-

fascism resembling Heideggers or Ernst Jngers.11 Batailles ambivalence towardwar, his assertion that fascism was a perfectly rational successor to republican-ism, 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 againstfascisma call that Bataille himself would come to regret.12

Of interest in Critique of Heidegger is Batailles theologico-political analy-sis of modern democracy and his rejection of fascism as illusory and insufficient.In this regard, his 1930s work recalls other contemporaries not fully committed to

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understanding Heidegger. See Sartre, Un nouveau mystique, SituationsI (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: Writingsfrom the 1930s, Alphabet City4/5 (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 posthumes19221940(Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 254, 264. Hereafter cited in the text as OC, with roman numer-als 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 ownrole in Contre-Attaque. See Bataille, Among the Surrealists, Alphabet City4/5 (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 Dbat29 (March 1984), pp. 1920. Thephilosophical significance of Batailles political disengagement is recounted in Peter Connor, GeorgesBataille and the Mysticism of Sin(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 147. It is impor-tant to reject the claim that Bataille helped delegitimate the Third Republic: to assign such responsibil-ity to a pornographer-mystic-philosopher who had only published a few scattered essays misses boththe problems and the very real strength of the Third Republic. Recent historical works have also ques-tioned the significance 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 sethan with the contestation of the primacy of secular/liberal/positivist motifs inEuropean Spirit. Such condemnations of existing democracies often mingled withattacks on claims of nineteenth-century science or on the Enlightenment potential

for barbarismin a sense they sought to save a spirit of autonomy by rejectingdemocracy. In the context Bataille was among the first to analyze fascisms sacraliza-tion of politics, its inversion of the Augustinian idea of the City of Man, and its attackon the claims of modern individualism.13 He identified fascisms overcoming ofprofane democratic reality with a political Unhappy Consciousness that replaces thegood God with the Chef-Dieu(God-Leader). The attention paid to themes like sover-eignty and freedom in Critique of Heidegger further expresses Batailles hostilitytoward democracy, the regime that he accuses of obliterating them in favor of a soci-ety 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 usingthe tag philosopher of fascism is remarkable. Sticking to Heideggers own accountin the Letter on Humanism (1946), historians of his French reception have gener-ally treated only the 1940s as the coming of age of French Heideggerianism,recognizing (a) a misbegotten, anthropological wave starting in the early 1930sand culminating in Sartres Being and Nothingness; (b) the postwar political debate inLes Temps modernesand other journals (194447); and (c) the more felicitous andsupposedly more rigorous approach that begins in the late 1940s, with JeanBeaufret, Jean Hyppolite, and others, and that becomes an important influenceon poststructuralism.14

The above interpretation sees the 1930s as little more than an opening tothese later developments, and notes the appearance of Emmanuel Levinass bookon Edmund Husserl, Alexandre Kojves Hegel seminar, and Henri Corbins trans-lation of Was ist Metaphysik? (What Is Metaphysics?) in the journal Bifurassetting up the anthropological first phase. This schema underplays both the rea-sons (epistemological, scientific, religious) that brought attention to Heideggeramong philosophers in the first place and the considerable transformations inphilosophy of science, religion, and humanism that ensued. At the heart of theturn 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

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13. Bataille, La structure psychologique du fascisme, in OC I, pp. 34648, 35456; trans. ThePsychological Structure of Fascism, in Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 19271939, ed. AllanStoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 143, 15456.14. See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001); EthanKleinberg, Generation Existential: Heideggers Philosophy in France(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,2005); and Bernard Waldenfels, Phnomenologie in Frankreich(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983).


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who taught either outside of Paris (Wahl until 1936, Canguilhem), at the slightlymarginal cole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Koyr, Kojve, Bachelard), or simplynot at university level (Marcel, Levinas, Sartre). Many of these thinkers wereimmigrants from the Soviet Union, had a German formation, and felt little enthusi-

asm for the previous generation in academic French philosophy (Alain, Bergson,Brunschvicg, Meyerson, etc.). For these foreigners, as for their French contemporarieslike Sartre, Maurice de Gandillac, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologyprovided until-then unimaginable grounding force of epistemological rigor. Forexample, echoing arguments by Gaston Bachelard and Koyr, the (later) Hegelianphilosopher Kojve did not hesitate to argue in 1931 that Heideggers distinction ofDasein(Being-there) from Vorhandensein(presence-at-hand) made possible, forthe first time, a philosophical understanding of scientific transformations, especiallyof the observing/observed systems distinction in Heisenbergs interpretation ofquantum mechanics.15

Already in 1928, Sartre had met the Japanese philosopher Count Kuki

Shuzo, who, during a short sjourin Paris, first mentioned Husserl and Heideggerto him,16 long before Raymond Aron famously pointed to his martini glass andfantasized about the effect of phenomenology on Sartre.17 For foreigners who,like Kuki, had studied at least in part in Germany, phenomenology (especiallyHeideggers, but also Husserls and Schelers) provided the crucial distancingmechanism against the elders Kantianism, especially insofar as it accompaniedthe new, antiposit ivist philosophy of science of Bachelard and Koyr, and philo-sophically grounded protoexistentialist approaches toward immanence and therole of metaphysical investigations.

It is also said that few knew of Heideggers Nazism until the postwar commu-

nist attack on it provoked the famous quarrel in Les Temps modernes(194547).18Nonetheless, it is now evident that the political debate began in the 1930s: Levinaswould later recall first hearing of Heideggers Nazism from Koyr before1933; hetook the news with stupor and disappointment, and also with the faint hope thatit expressed only the momentary lapse of a great speculative mind into practicalbanality.19Also prior to 1933, Arnaud Dandieu noted the affinity between Nazism


15. See my Le ralisme sans fondement: Physique quantique et phnomnologie au tournant desannes 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., Shuzo Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre(Carbondale: Southern IllinoisUniversity 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 France1, 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 Inquiry15, no. 2 (Winter 1989), p. 485. Nevertheless, a review by eitherKoyr or Levinas defended Heidegger, in 1933, from Hans Drieschs accusation of a mysticism of theirrational (Revue philosophique116 [1933], pp. 29091).


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and Heideggers thought and popularity in a text for the Revue dAllemagne.20 In anastonishing 1934 formulation, Gandillac paralleled Ernst Cassirers compliantcomportment toward Heidegger at the 1929 Davos debate to the succumbing ofthe 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 ofSein und Zeit(1927) and its worrying politics.22 In 1936, LaNouvelle revue thologiquepublished a book review that spoke of a shared understand-ing of Heidegger as the metaphysician of Nazism.23 And in 1938, Jean Wahlopened his philosophy course reprising Einleitung in die Philosophie, Heideggersown 1929 course, by expressing his displeasure with Heideggers public functionin Nazi Germany (the 193334 Rectorate), a function that politically tainted hisphilosophical call for inner Fhrerschaft(leadership) through Being-toward-death.24 Working on Heideggers 192829 course, Wahl told his students, woulddispense with this more recent problem. It is not excessive to claim then that thissensitivity to the political question appears to have been common currency in thegroup surrounding Koyr and the 193137 journal Recherches philosophiques, thegroup whose former members shaped Heideggers early reception and after 1945came to share a highly critical approach to him.25 In general, these thinkersscorned his embrace of Nazism, working to improve his thought and explicitlyassociating him with fascism. Among those close to Koyr, Bataille was the first toassign Heidegger the altogether different tag of philosopher of fascism.

Batailles Claim to Philosophy

How much did Bataille know of Heideggers thought and politicsand fromwhat posit ion could he call Heideggers a philosophy of fascism? In his 1946review of Levinas and Wahls contributions to existentialism, Bataille wrote:

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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.: HarvardUniversity 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 IsMetaphysics? appeared.23. Henri Thielemons, Existence tragique: la mtaphysique du nazisme, La Nouvelle revue

thologique6 (1939), pp. 56179.24. IMEC Fonds Wahl, Dossier Heidegger, Chemise Heidegger, p. 6. See Heideggers Gesamtausgabe27 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996) and Wahls 1945 reprisal of this course, interesting especially for its dis-tortions. Wahl, Introduction la pense de Heidegger(Paris: LGF, 1999).25. In addition to Levinass elaborate critiques of Heidegger, see Wahls Vers la fin de lontologie(Paris: ditions de lEnseignement Suprieur, 1956), where Wahl asks whether the question of Being isnot after all a question mal poseKoyrs objections to inviting Heidegger to Crisy in 1955, andKojves March 1968 interview (Quinzaine Litteraire115 [June 1968], pp. 1820), where Kojve, asked

why he no longer sought out philosophers, replied Philosophers? Who? . . . Heidegger? You know thatHeidegger, 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 momentswhich occur in a life of professional studies given over to the knowledgeofthe authentic. This life does not seem to be dominated by a terrible

passion: one cannot be surprised by a slippage, which is not necessary butpossible, from the authentic to Hitlerism. What dominated Heideggerwas doubtless the intellectual desire to reveal being (being and not exis-tence) in discourse (in philosophical language).26

Responding here to those who would classify Heidegger as an obscurissimecounterpartto Sartre,27 Bataille throws out the whole existentialist dimension of Heideggers work.His condemnation echoes those leveled at Heidegger by the nonorthodox early gen-eration (Kojve, Koyr, Levinas, Wahl) from the 1930s. It is original in that, written in1947, it recalls neither the postwar Heideggerian/Sartrean claim of having toleratedNazism to defend the university from it, nor the Marxist retort that Heideggers

Nazism was existentialisms true face. Rather, it argues that Heideggers misdirectedproject toward authenticity turned to fascism because it forsook passion for knowl-edge. Even when he writes that among contemporaries only Heidegger commandsadmiration,28 placing him in a Heidegger/Marx/Hegel pantheon, Bataille againexpresses serious concerns with Heideggers intellectual search for the authentic.29

Still, Batailles 1930s texts give rather unsure signs of his interest in phenom-enology. His literary output (especiallyLe Bleu du ciel[1935]) does not echo theencounters with nothingness to be found in Malraux, Nizan, and other contempo-raries. Yet, his most significant reference is a footnote to The PsychologicalStructure of Fascism, where he notes that the absence of any methodologicalconsiderations . . . will not fail to astonish and shock those who are unfamiliar withFrench sociology, modern German philosophy (phenomenology), and psycho-analysis.30 He later recalled having read a draft of Corbins French translation ofWhat Is Metaphysics?,31 a text he found seductive, and, echoing Koyrs intro-


26. Bataille, De lexistentialisme au primat de lconomie, in OC XI, p. 285; trans. FromExistentialism 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 philosophiquede Louvain44 (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 Sacrifice, in Fred Botting andScott 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 lameilleure 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 ofFascism, 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 undZeit.33 His comprehension can be traced to the two interrelated institutionsresponsible for phenomenologys early diffusion: the cole Pratique des Hautestudes and the journal Recherches philosophiques. From 1931 to 1933, Bataille

attended courses by Koyr at the EPHE, notably Relations Between Science andReligion in the Sixteenth Century; two courses on Nicolas of Cusa; and a courseon the young Hegelwhom Koyr engaged as the conclusion of his history ofGerman mysticism.34As is well known from 1933 on, Bataille became a regular inKojves famous seminar on Hegels Religious Philosophy,35 from which he inher-ited Kojves mix of Hegel and Heidegger.

Koyrs teaching during this period systematically contextualized the develop-ment of science within the history of religious and mystical thought, relativizing itspositivist and progressivist fantasies by seeing it as derivative of a metaphysical and reli-gious background.36 Later to influence Thomas Kuhn and a wide array of Europeanthinkers, Koyr had a controversial aura in the 1930s.37 Koyr argued that experimen-tation in science proves metaphysical presuppositions rather than discovering naturallaws,38 and he went on to suggest that Galileos detractors had legitimate reasons fordismissing his work, because its cosmological significance was unsubstantiated fromtheir Aristotelian viewpoint, indeed disruptive and nihilistic. Koyr also produced aminor 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

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metaphysique?, Bifur8 ( June 1931), pp. 732. Hereafter cited as WMfrom the English translation inPathmarks(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).32. Bataille, LExistentialisme, Critique41 (October 1950), p. 83. Bataille recounts the rejection of

Corbins translation by the Nouvelle Revue Franaise (blaming Julien Benda) and argues that Corbinchose Bifurbecause 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 myst ique la science: Cours, confrences et documents 19221962, ed.Pietro Redondi (Paris: EHESS, 1986), pp. 4142; Bataille, Romans et rcits, pp. civcv; and RodolpheGasch, 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 andoccasionally 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 over-looked, is central to his approach, and to the way in which he, Bataille, and Koyr often treated reli-gious, metaphysical, and social arguments as coextensive. Bataille refers to some of the thinkers he hadstudied 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 scientifique(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,Archeion21 (1938), p. 281, cited inDe la mystique la science, p. 35; and Thomas Kuhn, Alexandre Koyrand the history of science: On an intellectual revolution, in Encounter34, no. 1 (1970), pp. 6769. ForKoyrs influence, see the FestschriftMlanges 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 Never-Ending 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 scientifique, pp. 21323. See alsoDe la mystique la science, pp. 3637.


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science is reflected in Kojves foundation of philosophy on religion (and religionsperpetuation via sublation), and is paramount for Batailles linking of science torepressive uniformity and his privileging the sacred over the profane.

Koyr was influential in other ways as well. In the early 1930s, he started an

extensive discussion of Galileo and modern science with his former teacherHusserl.40 He sponsored the first translations of Heidegger, introducing Corbinstranslation of What Is Metaphysics? and publishing, in the first issue ofRecherchesphilosophiques, a translation of Vom Wesen des Grundes (On the Essence ofGround)which in the French context served as an explicit critique of Kant andpositivism, and which pointed to a novel conception of reality, existence, andtruth. Founded in 1931 by Koyr and two colleagues from the EPHE, and latercoedited with Wahl and Bachelard, Recherches philosophiqueswas specifically gearedtoward an overcoming of the previous philosophical generation. It includedphenomenological essays (often in translation), reviews of a range of contempo-rary studies, and startling debates on metaphysics and the philosophy of science.41

Among its contributors were also Raymond Aron, Georges Dumzil, BernhardGroethuysen, Kojve, Gabriel Marcel, Sartre, and Leo Strauss, all of whom were orbecame major figures in their own right. Bataille contributed to the journal a firstKojvian version of The Labyrinth, which was published right next to LevinassOn Escape and an essay on Hegel by Karl Lwith.42

These figures and connections are significant to Batailles case for a numberof reasons. First, they contextualize and bear out his claim to be speaking as aphilosopher. They suggest a semiacademic context in which Bataille learned aboutphenomenology and conversed with philosophical contemporaries whom herarely wrote about. They also visibly influence his work, e.g., his presentations to

the Collge de sociologie, his occasional politico-philosophical treatments of sci-ence, and especially his 1943 Inner Experience. They point to a casual personal circlewhere he could discuss his approachat the Caf dHarcourt after Kojves semi-nars, with Corbin, Kojve, Auguste Queneau, Simone Weil, and sometimes alsoKoyr and Levinas.43And 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 theFrankfurt Schools Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung6 (1937), pp. 41720.42. Bataille, Le Labyrinthe, in Recherches philosophiques5, no. 6 (1935), pp. 36472; trans. TheLabyrinth in Visions of Excess, pp. 17177. Hereafter cited with references first to the French and then

to the English. The text was reprised under the same name in Inner Experience, without the first twopages, which essentially repeat Kojves interpretation of the master-slave dialectic. See Bataille,LExprience intrieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), pp. 97110; trans. Inner Experience(Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1988), pp. 8192.43. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojve(Paris: Grasset, 1990), p. 363. Regarding the nonconformistpolitics of this group, it is significant to note that Kojve and Corbin translated Henri de Mans Lidesocialiste(Paris: Grasset, 1935). This hardly saddles them with de Mans later pathat the time, thebook had been publicly burned in Germany, and in France those favorably citing de Mans workincluded influential figures like Jacques Maritain. It does, however, strongly indicate an interest ontheir part in unorthodox, revisionist Marxism.


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around Recherches philosophiques, that was marked by specific investments in theearly Heideggerian corpus and strong rejections of Heideggers politics. SinceKoyr had told Levinas of Heideggers political involvement in the early 1930s, it isunlikely 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 con-cerns and introduce Critique of Heidegger, clarifying some of its ambiguities:The Psychological Structure of Fascism (1933), The Labyrinth (1936), and theDossier 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 thematicallyat times even word-for-word, as in these two passages describing their sharedtreatment of money and social homogeneity:

From the immediate life that is imposed on me first 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 equiva-lence, 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 equiva-lent of the different products of collective activity. Money serves tomeasure all work and makes man a function of measurable products.45

Both texts identify democracy with homogeneity (the erasure of difference andtension) and describe society as torn between authority and an opposite. InCritique of Heidegger, this opposite is anarchy, which democracy, in ThePsychological Structure of Fascism, fends off through adaptation:

. . . write briefly, saying that it could be shown that society is tornbetween authority and anarchy. Disappearance of the being of societies

with democracy. (CH, p. 3; p. 27)46

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44. The passage also evokes Batailles La notion de dpense, in OC I, pp. 30220; trans. TheNotion of Expenditure, in Visions of Excess, pp. 11629.45. Bataille, La structure psychologique du fascisme, p. 340; The Psychological Structure ofFascism, p. 138.46. Bataille considers the metaphysical question of the nature of societies in numerous texts ofthe period, notably Rapports entre socit, organisme, tre, OCII, pp. 295, 29799.


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In practical terms, the function of the State consists of an interplay ofauthority and adaptation. The reduction of differences through com-promise in parliamentary practice indicates all the possible complexityof the internal activity of adaptation required by homogeneity . . .

depending on whether the State is democratic or despotic, the prevail-ing tendency will be either adaptation or authority.47

Democracys destruction of the Being of society opens up a range of problems, firstamong them the opposition between sovereignty and homogeneity. Bataille doesnot 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 homogenizedexistence. Insofar as such sovereignty is threatened by political uniformity, this isreflected in scientific and metaphysical terms. Batailles claims concerning sciencecome on the heels of contemporary philosophers and philosophers of science,notablyRecherches philosophiquescontributors Bachelard, Kojve, and Koyr. In his

LAthisme(1931), scientific writings, and Hegel lectures,49 Kojve specifically usedHeideggers treatment ofworldto set up homogeneity as a force aiming at the era-sure of mans difference from the realm in which he existsand which heunsuccessfully seeks to overcome by investing in figures of authority and meta-physical power.50 Critique of Heidegger echoes these concerns and clearlyinvokes (a) Heideggers approach to intentionality, scientific reduction, and themeaning ofworld in On the Essence of Ground, available since 1932 in Recherchesphilosophiques,51 and (b) Bachelards psychoanalysis of objective knowledgea set ofantipositivist arguments that Bachelard saw as the theoretical consequence of HansReichenbachs and Werner Karl Heisenbergs indeterminisms, and which he alsofirst presented in Recherches philosophiques.52 Batailles use ofrepression in Critique of


47. Bataille, La structure psychologique du fascisme, p. 342; The Psychological Structure ofFascism, p. 139.48. On the issue of authority, Bataille cites Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Egoin ThePsychological Structure of Fascism, p. 160. See the discussion in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in The FreudianSubject(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 270, n. 37. See also Kojves 1942 La Notionde 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 math-ematical 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 philo-

sophical and mathematical issue. Similarly, Kojve approached finitude through a mathematical con-ception of the infinite in LAthisme(Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 2014. See also Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel, p. 217; for Kojves studies, seeDe la mystique la science, pp. 2729, 4146, 5052.50. Kojve, LAthisme, pp. 95, 10610, 12630.51. Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, first translated into French as De la nature de la cause,in Recherches philosophiques1 (193132), pp. 83104; hereafter cited asEG, from the English translationOn the Essence of Ground, in Pathmarks.52. Gaston Bachelard, Noumne et microphysique, Recherches philosophiques1 (193132), p. 55.Bachelard expanded on these issues in other reviews for Recherches philosophiques, and in his La Formation delesprit scientifique(Paris: Vrin, 1938); trans. The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester: Clinamen,


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Heidegger nods to Bachelards language, rather than Freuds. Here, science ishomogenizing; 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-scientific issue alsobleeds over into metaphysical kinds of questioning. Assuming the hostility towardpositivism of figures that influenced Bataille (Bachelard, Heidegger, Kojve, LonShestov), his reference to science as homogeneous can be said to carry the pejora-tive inflection that metaphysical has for Heidegger, and heterogeneity directlyparallels the nothing as Heidegger posits it in What Is Metaphysics?: science for-gets that only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselvesobjects of investigation (WM, p. 95). Central also to Kojves influence on Bataillestableaux htrologiques (OCII, pp. 177204) and his Critique of Heidegger is

the thought of understanding man as a being fundamentally grounded in andbound by the straitjacket of immanence, a being at least contrasted to the image oftranscendence and heterogeneity (a topic that also invokes Heideggers question ofauthenticity). But while Kojve emphasizes the inaccessibility of the heterogeneousin atheist modernity, Bataille (with Heidegger) tends to the inaccessibility and illu-sion of an other to be found in society, and seeks to think man against the scientificerasure of such an other. Secular existence is homogeneous and uniform, painlessand 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 prob-lematization of the limitations of Being. Complicating the contrast of sovereigntyto homogeneity, The Labyrinth argues for an alternative conception of the rela-tionship between Being and the individual. Well in step with a large number oftexts from Recherches philosophiques that seek a concrete ground for philosophicalinquiry, The Labyrinth attacks sufficiencyand consistencyas limitations in life andexistence. Bataille pretends to subsume Kojves master/slave conflict; then,implicitly founding insufficiency on Kojves understanding of desire, he turns itinto 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 insufficiency. Inisolation, each man sees the majority of others as incapable or unwor-thy of being. . . . The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested

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2002). As mentioned already, Kojve agreed that the Heisenberg interpretation of quantum physics calledfor a new philosophical anthropology in his Lide du dterminisme(Paris: Livre de poche, 1990).53. It alics 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 repugnancegreets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight through which myprofound insufficiency is betrayed. . . .55

This last sentence turns Kojves desire for recognition on its head: rather thanmerely show a structural failure built into desire, social existence betrays everybeings ontological lackand only a radical retreat from society (a burst oflaughter . . . ) can allow human life a respite, i.e., a positive acceptance of thislack. This near absolutizing of insufficiency as a dimension of existence furtherdisrupts Kojves assumption that desire only matures in its failure to confrontdeath, in its subjection to slavery. Still, Batailles implicit target here is Heidegger:without a proclamation of insufficiency as a central factor in all existence, Being isnothing but immanence reducing the individual to shared uniform sociality. Thisis to say that, for Bataille, Being is not something Ihave access to, but instead whatmakes 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 wantoutside of me. It is a clumsy man, still incapable of eluding theintrigues of nature, who locks being in the ego. Being in fact is foundnowhere and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to bedivine, 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 relationshipbetween Being and the individual can be better described as a codependence aim-

ing to disrupt the harmonious immanence of secular, scientific, uniform boredom:Batailles treatment instead opens up a different ontology, for which Being isungraspable because bothmy insufficiencyandthe excessive presence of myimmanence in the world require that Being be impossible to simply place or con-trol. To approach the question of Being is not merely to pose it, but to link it to aflight from self-sufficient human reality, from Being as it presently is, from anyanswer to the question of Being that celebrates its reality.

The Text

Insofar as it echoes such treatments of homogeneity, sovereignty, Being, andtumult, Critique of Heidegger fits 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, thatInner Experienceis certainly not worse, also notbetter than books by two Christian mystics he had been reading. Published in Kojve, Lettres GeorgesBataille, Textures70, 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 ofCritique of Heidegger gives careful and clear indications of Batailles approach tothree central problems: (a) the critique of Heideggers thought, (b) the discussionof fascism and Heidegger in the context of the anthropo-theological foundations of

modern politics, and (c) Batailles evocation of an exit from modern reality, interms clearly evocative of Levinass work from the period. My aim in this moreanalytical section is to show: first, that Bataille credits Heidegger with permittinga sort of reenchantment of the world, i.e., with opening up a thinking unbound bythe limitations of classical ontology, which reduces man to homogeneous subjec-tivity, and second, that Bataille also accuses Heidegger of closing this world in anillusory quest for authenticity, rather than recognizing the fundamental tumul-tuousness and pain of Being. In this light, Heideggers philosophy comes toresemble fascisms promise. Both seek an overcoming of bourgeois, profane limi-tations, but in the same gesture, show this call to be misdirected, and indeeddestructive 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 fromexisting thought and Being.

a. Bataille and Heidegger

Impossibility of existing for oneselfwhich is to say: dyingHeideggeriantranscendence (CH, p. 3; p. 27). This linking of death to transcendence foregroundsthe two thinkers shared concern with finitude and relates this interest to their hostil-ity to inauthentic social homogeneity. But as an explicit reference to Heidegger, it ismisleading. Coming early in the text, the reference gives no indication of the signifi-cant difference between their respective approaches to Beinga difference thatconcerns us here, and that ultimately explains the above quote.

Whereas in Heidegger the ontological difference downplays the role ofworldin the appropriative contrast ofBeingand beings, Bataille proceeds to locate Beingin contradistinction to bothbeings and the world. Here, he attacks two ofHeideggers philosophical moves: first, he turnsDaseininto le moi, the ego, the I,myego;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 undirectedcore specific to the being that I am. Clearly evocative of Husserls pure ego,59 lemoi is distinct from the world and unaffected by its process of determination. Asthe origin of intention, le moi is also what demonstrates a/my specific beings

insufficiencyits failure to get satisfaction in and from the world. Batailles argu-ment on insufficiency specifically attacks Heideggers claim that, because of

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58. Throughout this essay and the translation, I have translated Batailles le moias the ego. See foot-note 6 of the translation.59. Husserl, IdeenI (HusserlianaIII) (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976); trans. IdeasI (The Hague: M.Nijhoff, 1982), 4755. See also the fourth of Husserls Cartesianische Meditationen(Husserliana I) (TheHague: M. Nijhoff, 1973); trans. Cartesian Meditations(The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), 3033. By 1931,Koyr, Levinas, and G. Pfeiffer had translated Cartesian Meditationsinto French.


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Dasein, beings always appear manifest as a whole (EG, p. 120). The antisubjectivistcritique of subjective sufficiency suggested here by Batailles ego is precisely aconsequence of the rejection of this wholeness.

The second attack amplifies the first. 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 codependencebetween Daseinand the world. That is to say, it is never clear where the limits ofDaseins world lie, if world specifically surrounds thisDaseinand, in a sense, belongsto it, or instead world merely forms the ontic domain in whichDaseinfinds itself.60Instead Bataille highlights the very contrast of the world to the ego and the failure ofeach to comply with the demands of the other (intention versus determination,insufficiency and desire versus homogeneity) (CH, pp. 9, 11, 15; pp. 3032).61Heidegger would object to this treatment of world and Being as spatial or anthropo-logical: World is not a mere regional title used to designate the human communityas 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 Batailleseyes, it is Heidegger who is too Kantian, despite his critique of Kant (EG, pp.11519), because he emphasizes world as something encompassing men and theentirety of their relations and thus does not sufficiently demarcate the world as a bat-tlefield for the intentions and insufficiency of my ego against those of others, as arealm from whose restrictive forces man continually seeks to escape (CH, p. 11; p. 30).

Given that, for Bataille, Being delineates the subjects insufficiency amid theinterplay of ego and world, it is revealed precisely where the determination andintention of each fails to reach and dominate the other. Being is outsideme, out-side my formless ego, to be contrasted to meand worldalike.62 In a sense, Being is

what happens when the torn ego clashes with the worldand thus Being can beexpressed or recognized as love, chance, tear, or tumult. Thus, moreover, Bataillecan define the ego, the world, and Being as seeking to escape from each other, aspassing through each other like liquid through ones fingers (CH, p. 4; p. 27).

This difference of approach is the basis of Batailles critique: because phe-nomenology does not adequately present this clash, it contributes to the world ofhomogeneity. Having already noted the totalizing aims of Heideggers Being,Bataille proceeds to criticize other concepts like intentionality, existence, andanxiety as contributing to the loss of sovereignty. For example, intention(takenfrom Husserl and from Heideggers On the Essence of Ground) is not specific tomy 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 egoprogressively loses its individual character and finds 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 ofBeing and Time.


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

value that makes it escape from the strictly egoform 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 processof determination that exhausts the ego, it is crucial to note that Bataille also sees in

this process the advent ofself-consciousness(CH, p. 9; p. 30). Self-consciousness forceshomogeneity upon the pure ego, but also makes possible my interaction with theworld before me, my recognition of my submission to the world and of the possibilityof a flight from this world. Bataille can thus find in Heidegger both the ground forand the limitations of an exit from standardization and material degradation. Hisapproach to the lusterless employee (CH, p. 9; p. 30) recalls the more pejorative ofHeideggers descriptions ofdas Man, emphasizingin terms evocative of existen-tialismthe need for self-consciousness that can lead to this exit. But if Heideggerhelps us see the malaise, anxiety (Heideggers way out) is merely a substitute forold, noble, failed values (CH, pp. 2, 16; pp. 2526, 33), and fails to engage the tear inme and between me and the world (CH, p. 3; p. 27). It fails to emancipate the indi-

vidual, it gives a false and unself-conscious aura of individuality while accepting thatthis life is by and large bound by and lost in society. Rather than break with the mis-ery of homogeneity, it makes individuals believe in their own (false) transcendence.Bataille elucidates his opposition to the implications of anxiety in the coda of his1935 The Blue of Noon, where narrator Troppmann presents a band of Hitler Youthplaying music:

The sight was obscene. It was terrifyingif I hadnt been blessed withexceptional composure, how could I have stood and looked at thesehateful automatons as calmly as if I were facing a stone wall? Each peal ofmusic in the night was an incantatory summons to war and murder. . . . Isaw them, so near me, entranced by a longing to meet their death, hallu-cinated by the endless fields where they would one day advance.63

The obscene, terrifying scene can be closely identified with the picture of anxietyas well as with Critique of Heideggers reference to the first accents of this newBeing as vulgar (CH, p. 16; p. 33). It also contrasts starkly with the earlier climax, inwhich Troppmann and Dirty/Dorothea make love in a cemetery, emphasizing thedifference between the authenticity of the musicians facing the blue of noon as theylong to meet their death and Troppmanns escape into a world of sex and death. Itbrings back the issue of the overt reference to Heidegger in Critique of

Heidegger, the impossibility of existing for oneself (CH, p. 3; p. 27). Against thisrising tide of murder, Bataille insists on the very impossibility of dominating theworld by existing for oneself, that is to say by looking death in the face (CH, p. 3;


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p. 27).64 Turning thus against the illusory character of Heideggerian transcen-dence, Bataille notes in the opening of his text that it is not just anxiety, but alsothe tumult, and the impression of being torn that mark Being and that aid a beingto 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 ofexternal servitudedemands 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 thesubjects self-sufficiency and its desire to dominate the world, underplays the sub-jects attempts to distance itself from the exigencies of the world.

Accordingly, it is internal tumult and tearthat serve as guides to the limits andmeaning 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 discrepancybetween ego and world, as they form the place of my self-conscious attempt atan evasion of this world. These two concepts are particularly significant as imma-nent critiques of Heideggers treatment of freedom as ground (EG, p. 129), offreedom as a fundamental opening of the abyss (EG, p. 127; WM, p. 91) and as aconstrictive setting of ones world (EG, p. 122). For Bataille, genuine freedom isnot a condition of the possibility of existence (as in Heidegger), but what positsthe ego as bothtorn internallyandautochthonous with regard to external submis-sion (CH, pp. 45; pp. 2728). Bataille charges Heidegger with empowering thehomogeneous world by presenting people as human ready-to-hands, or tools withfantasies of authenticity, whose only experience beyond homogeneity (anxiety)can be nothing more than what reveals their life as a continuous function, ratherthan what reveals their existential distance from the functional role they play in

society. For Bataille, once they serve no further purpose than to balance theirintention with realitys expectations and demands, individuals lose their Being.Freedom is with sovereignty, with the tumult and therefore with ungraspableBeing: like them, it does not mark mans everyday existence. And like them, itpoints out its opposition to all such existence and their status as counterpoint towhat presents itself as human life that is imposed on me . . . (CH, p. 6; p. 28).


64. Bataille, Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice, p. 33; Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice, pp. 28687. This cri-tique, 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. Whatthese texts have most in common is a question: given that the moment of looking death in the face, theexperience of death, is itself impossible, what distinguishes Being-toward-death from other exceptionalmoments? Do we know death except through the death of others? Kojve dedicated some beautifulpages 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: Mourirsattendreaux 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 PaolaMarrati, 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 Bataillespolitical ambiguity. It introduces the political problem by writing that with democ-racy, the Being of societies disappears (CH, p. 3; p. 27)that democracyfacilitates a homogenization of society unseen in classical and other modernregimes. This involves a certain ontologism that needs to be distinguished fromorganicism, which Bataille repeatedly rejects.66 Emulating Heideggers accordingofDasein to nonhuman entities (e.g., Volksdasein), Batailles Being of societiestranscends (or sidesteps) the everyday politics involved in democratic decisionmaking, announcing instead a role for such Being in the politics of life, capable offorming lifeand humanity. But in contrasting life and Being to the reduction ofman to a functionpointing to what happens when life frees itself from degrada-tion (CH, p. 2; p. 26)Bataille shows how the tear in the ego may result in anexperience of freedom quahappiness in the midst of servility: In the moment

when I write, I breathe with all my strength, and I breathe free. Free in the worldwhere my submission is nevertheless required, how could [being] free have here anymeaning other than happy? (CH, p. 5; p. 28). Bataille can hence imagine a role forpolitical reality: to notreduce 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 miserymay lie with such new being. If Being is totally new (if Bataille acceptsHeideggers claim to having dethroned traditional ontology, and the politicalimplications of this claim), then new, different political formations can beexpected. Batailles ambivalence toward fascism rests on this point: Certainly, thisis a totally other way of being that is proposed to existence, and thus one shouldnot be surprised that out of this new fermentation that enters the world and thatthe world had not yet made possiblethe first accents are of an almost insur-mountable acidity (CH, p. 16; p. 33). Some imaginary nonliberal politics maybring about such change, yet existingforms of fascism apparently do not seebeyond use value, and the symbolism and spiritualism they invoke is but windowdressing, like the fascinating and horrible Hitler Youths ofThe Blue of Noon. To putit differently, while fascism asserts a break with democratic, bourgeois reality, itwipes away the tumult that is fundamental to the individual, and hence destroyshis Being. Fascism uses the heterogeneous it evokes to further reinstate andimpose homogeneity.

Batailles opening to some sort of reenchantment of the world, to a lifebeyond good and evil, to Being as chance, finds its hopes dashed by insurmount-ably acidic accents of this new fermentation. Like Heideggers philosophy,fascism invests in an imagined redemption that might conceivably found a new

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66. See Batailles notes from Kojves Hegel course: la socit est donc bien un tre au sens dumot . . . mais lappeler un organisme na pas de sens (BNF Fonds Bataille, 8B, 15). This note mirrorsBatailles discussions of the tre composat the Collge de Sociologie (OCII, p. 295).


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waybut does not: tumult, tear, inner division are all wiped out by fascism as weak-nesses. When Bataille thus turns to advocate an exit from this politics andphilosophy, 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 thatthe political can construct a Being or life beyond and in contrast with politicalbeing is everpresent in Critique of Heidegger; this beyond can easily be identi-fied with Batailles discussion of chance.67

This is why, for Bataille, Heideggers is a philosophy of fascism. Heideggerprovides the foundations for a thinking that moves outside and beyond the degra-dation and limits of modern homogeneous reality, presumably identified here asthose of inauthentic existence (das Man). Yet like fascism, he does not allow thereal discrepancy between an individuals existence and his world to manifest so asto allow for genuine freedom amid servility. Heidegger thinks up an escape fromthe oppression of inauthenticity of modern life, but also because of his destructive

illusion of authenticit y and heterogeneity, he renders real escape impossible.

c. Bataille and Levinas

The pairing of Bataille and Levinas at first strikes the reader as unlikely. Yet itseems they knew each other, and Bataille once cited Levinass Reflections on thePhilosophy of Hitlerism (1934) as the only useful piece written on Nazi ideology.68Critique of Heidegger also shares theoretical concerns with LevinassDe lvasion(On Escape, [1935]).69 In particular, their advocacy of exit (CH, p. 9; p. 30) aimsbeyond the traditional post-Kantian, positivist framework, while also turning againstthe Hegelian and Heideggerian advances, so as to insist on the failures of any philos-ophy that does not form, in its very foundations, the desire of the subject to escapethe world in which it finds itself, the existence whose limits it must forever face.

Read as a reaction to the economic and political instability of the Frenchmid-1930s, Levinass De lvasion (published in Recherches philosophiquesnext toBatailles The Labyrinth) presents a quasi-romantic protest against the malaiseof bourgeois modernity (E, p. 50)a demand for a flight from a society perme-ated by financial 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 first subtitled On Nietzscheas Will to Chance, a motif he consistently identifiedwith the escape from restricted economy.68. Emmanuel Levinas, Quelques rflexions sur la philosophie de lhitlerisme, in Levinas, LesImprvus de lhistoire(Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994), pp. 2336. Batailles reference is in Nietzsche et les fas-cistes, in Acphale, January 21, 1937; trans. Nietzsche and the Fascists, in Visions of Excess, pp. 19293.69. Levinas, De lvasion in Recherches philosophiques5 (1935-1936), pp. 37392; republished asDelvasion(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 affinitybetween 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 noncon-formism with the claims that every civilization that accepts beingwith the tragicdespair it contains and the crimes it justifiesmerits 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 self-sufficient life and the bankrupt ontology justifying it. Levinas radicalizes escape toformalize the insatiable need for an escape inandfromthe purity of Being: whileescape as such is necessary, semiempirical, philosophical, literary, and other sortsof escape are inadequate and unsatisfactory. Thus Levinas considers and putsaside: (a) Heideggers philosophy and a mysticism of Being (E, pp. 51, 54); (b) lit-erary 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) andclaims to the infinity of Being (E, p. 69). Moreover, he rejects the possibility thatescape 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 finally, (k) a thinkingof nothingness (E, p. 70). Despite their character as formal indications of escape,these applications or instances are no more than indices of the existents needto exit its Being. Levinas grants this need affirmative traits: it marks the fleeingfrom self-sufficiency (E, p. 54) and thus is liable to break up our bourgeois exis-tence (E, p. 53), which is insatiable, irreducible from the point of view of thesubject (E, p. 53). Escape is excendence, the subjects movement toward transcen-dence amid a groundless homogenizing reality that has rendered genuinetranscendence impossible and meaningless.

Bataille identifies with this radical sense of revolt, particularly its lack ofdirection or justification: The aspiration to something wholly other is strongerthan the need to justify the will to flee (CH, p. 2; p. 26). Exit must emphasizeimprobability, indeterminacy, the failure of intention and science. Bataille againapproaches phenomenology at the point where intention doubles back into itselfand my presence is revealed by the failure of my intention to reach its target:

Effectuation of the exit {} What happens when life frees itself fromdegradation. Not only anxiety, but also tumult, and the impression ofbeing torn. The I am there: the region of I am there where existencetakes place (in the existential sense). This region protects from a

determination or an intention. Nevertheless, this fact distinguishesitself from intention, because it conflicts with itself when achievingintentional form. Yet it cannot exist without intention. The ego isthus only revealed by intention, albeit too muchand in its develop-ment, it is further revealed by the critique of the intentionality of

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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 intention-ality. (CH, pp. 23; p. 26)

Insufficientbeing cannot bind itself to its reduced modern manifestations, cannotcome to agree with a determined existence amid intentionality. In its critique ofintention, this passage encounters Levinass analysis of nausea and shame (E, pts.VVI). Like Levinas, who rejects Bergsons lan vitalfor its formal posteriority toHeideggerian Being and its irrelevance in a world where Heidegger has come topassBataille uses Beingand the ego in a manner that clearly indicates his dis-tance from pre-Heideggerian ontology, and his critical engagement with theontological difference. His play between my egoand the worlddoes not allow meto escape the world, but joins this juxtaposition with a language of freedom andsubmission (a rhetoric Levinas never resorts to).Egoand worldseek to escape fromthemselves 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 neces-sary: it is only the coming to pass of Heideggers thought that makes a genuineescape or excendence possible. Escape is at once a movement beyond Being anda consequence inherent in the basic structure of Beingwhich is precisely why itis virtually impossible to achieve. In other words, it too demands (at least) a dou-ble movement: a philosophical paradigm shift into Heideggerian ontology and arecognition of this ontology as a prison. Bataille would agree: like excendence, hisexit involves precisely the impossibility of an opening of the strictly speakinghomogeneous to heterogeneityto the sacred, etc. There are two main differ-ences, however. First, for Bataille, exit has an empirical characterthat it is linkedto intimacy, sexuality, ecstasy, expenditure, and so on. Particularly so, becauseunlike Levinas, Bataille sees life, the claim I live (and I sense), as indispens-able, and the more his work approaches a thinking of death, the more it becomesfascinated by its recoil from death, by the perseverance of life in tumult. Bataillesvitalism is not a pre-Heideggerian residue, but precisely an attempt to providesome sort of only partially empirical texture to fundamental ontology, to avoidHeideggers emphasis on the authenticating function of death in favor of arespect for laughter, ecstasy, and so onand, a step further, for sovereignty. If, inThe Labyrinth, Bataille largely limits himself to a thinking of insufficiency, nondis-

cursive existence, laughter, ecstasy resulting from divergences between concept (orproject) and Being, in Critique of Heidegger, escape from Being suggests a moveinto a totally other conception of Being, world, and life (CH, pp. 6, 16; pp. 28, 33).

The second main difference extends from the first. Rather than rejectinginstances of exit as insufficient, Bataille largely subsumes them in his call for anexit, even as he affirms that the need for exit will still be present even under dif-ferent political and philosophical grounds. Unlike Levinas, Critique 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 inopenness to new demigods (Hitler included) as much as he formulated a reclaim-ing 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 thesubject, but to a call for a contrast of subjectivity to the world and to heterogene-ity (or claims thereto) within society and modernity. While exit does not have anecessary, manifest content, it does nonetheless claim for itself a specific terrain inand against individual desire and self-sufficiency. This terrain may be that of Beingas defined in Batailles conceptionBeing as outside me, outside my egoasBataille only partly allies this modified version of the Being/beings oppositionwith his heterogeneity/homogeneity dist inction. In an argument and a tone remi-niscent of Levinass De lvasion, Batailles exit counters the phenomenologicalreduction and Heideggers ontological difference not by seeking to escape thesocial misery or existential anguish his thought shared with Heidegger, but instead

by rejecting Heideggers opposition to a radical tear in existence, his advocacy ofauthenticity in the showdown of existence and death. Whether exit is an exit intobeing or even an exit from precarious Being, the crux of the Critique ofHeidegger is a call to think the ontological difference differently.

This attack on Heidegger is indicative of a nuanced 1930s French reading ofthe latters early texts, but also indicative of the two trends, existentialist and anti-humanist, that the reception of Heidegger would take up in the 1940s. In Bataillestext, what might be called French phenomenologyaccepts Heidegger as a privilegedinterlocutor, while objecting to what it perceives as a trend in his and Husserlsthought toward a theory of formalized subjectivity insensitive to the density of indi-

vidual life. Instead, for Bataille, the celebration of the clash between ego and Beingestablishes subjectivity, the fundamental nonequivalence between different lives,and the subjects claim to Being (CH, pp. 25, 8; pp. 2528, 2930). Batailles con-fusion of ontological with social and psychological categories, of Levinass need totake leave of Beingwith a defense of life in stifling social circumstances, is fundamen-tal to existentialisms development. But it is also central to understanding whyneither resistance originating in social causes (in Sartre) nor onto-theologicalkinds of escape (as in Marcels writings) would by themselves suffice for Bataillesgeneration during the peak of existentialism in the 1940sand why this genera-tion (Bataille above all) would emphasize its mistrust of political humanismsagainst existentialism and Marxism. Bataille echoes here a politics of existentialrejuvenation that situates him squarely in an antidemocratic camp, yet he alsosnubs the claims of Heidegger and fascism to authenticity through finitude. Inrejecting the primacy of the ontological difference and of Heideggers approach ofBeing, Bataille aims not only for a different, less politically troubled conception ofBeing, but also for a thinking, shared with Levinas, that upholds the possibility, orfantasy, of becoming other, of exiting, of escaping everything that still is.

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