Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXVIII. Foucault - part 8
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare - Cont...
p83
According to Blanchot, every truly powerful work of art is a singular compound of form and chaos: “The work is the pure circle where, even as he writes the work, the author dangerously exposes himself to, but also protects himself against, the pressure that demands that he write.” Like Andre Breton and the surrealists, Blanchot regarded works wrested from delirium, dreaming, and the terrible beauty of uncontrollable passion as communicating a special kind of wisdom. The dream, he once declared, amounts to a “dangerous call,” a “premonition of the other,” a “double that is still somebody.” Exploring the unconscious and the unthought, what an author discovers is “a part of himself, and, more than that, his truth, his solitary truth,” swirling in “a cold immobility from which he cannot turn away, but near which he cannot linger” -- for the repetitions and recurrences are (just as Freud had divined in his analysis of thanatos, Blanchot noted) the siren song “of death itself.”
The writer in Blanchot’s view thus becomes a figure strangely like Ellen West: someone who cannot help being fascinated by death, “attracted by an ordeal in which everything is risked, by an essential risk where being is at stake, where nothingness slips away, where, that is, the right, the power to die is wagered.”
Yet if the work that grows out of such an ordeal is successful, the author will not only survive, he will (Just as Heidegger promised) experience a miraculous kind of ascent into grace: “Through an inexplicable maneuver, through some distraction or through the sheer excessiveness of his patience,” the author will find himself “suddenly inside the circle,” folded back upon himself, the void now contained by the work, which “forms a part of himself from which he feels he is free and from which the work has contributed to freeing him.”
p84
The forms in which a work could accomplish this magical feat of transforming (and so “saving”) its author were as protean and varied as the creative genius of each truly creative individual. As a matter of taste, Blanchot was a connoisseur of modernism: in the late 1940s and 1950s, he devoted incisive essays to the poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Rilke, and René Char; and to the novelists and short-story writers Kafka, Beckett, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet. He was the only prominent French critic of the time to take the Marquis de Sade as seriously as Foucault did. And he was a dedicated reader of modern philosophy: besides Heidegger, he admired Nietzsche, and also the pioneering French Nietzschean, George Bataille.
I am going to skip Hermann Broch and The Death of Virgil on p84-85.
Georges Bataille.
p86
Like Nietzsche, Bataille throughout his life sang the praises of Dionysian moments of communal effervescence, of reverie and madness, of intoxication and ecstasy -- all “moments of excess that stir us to the roots of our being and give us strength enough to allow free reign to our elemental nature.” And like the Marquis de Sade, his other great intellectual hero, he thought that impulses commonly called cruel were central to our elemental nature; the pursuit of uninhibited eroticism laid bare a deep seated drive “to destroy,” “to annihilate,” to spoil even the simplest things, and (at the limit) to embrace death in a “torment of orgies,” in a sensuous lust for blood so sanguinary that it welcomed even ‘the agony of war.”
On one level, this was sheer bluster: like the mousy protagonist in one of his favorite books, Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, Bataille took malicious delight in being “impossible.” in making outrageous statements and stubbornly standing by them. But on another level, Bataille was a deeply serious man. An habitué of the demimonde, he acted out a great many of the erotic fantasies he described...
p87
As Bataille would later concede, some of his writing in this period [1930s] brought him uncomfortably close to fascism. But Bataille also embraced a bizarre kind of Marxism, believing (with apparent fervor in the 1930s) that the only way to unleash the alienated elemental nature of the human being was through “a fiery and bloody revolution” that would smash the suffocating values Bataille associated not just with bourgeois legality and capitalism, but also with nationalism and organized militarism.
Bataille is looking more and more like the model for Naphtha.
For Foucault in these years, however, the heart of Bataille’s achievement was not his theory of revolution, but rather his understanding of erotic transgression. “Perhaps one day,” Foucault speculated in an essay written shortly after Bataille’s death in 1962, the idea of transgression “will seem as decisive for our culture, as much a part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier time for dialectical thought.”
“Transgression,” as Foucault defines Bataille’s idea, “is an act which involves the limit,” violently breaching the customary restraints on sexual behavior and putting into play the sort of “‘denaturalized ‘” eroticism so vividly imagined by the Marquis de Sade. The very violence of Sade’s erotic fantasies testifies to the force of those elemental impulses that most modern societies have tried to brand as abnormal. Yet even most civilized creatures of modern cultures, as Foucault had remarked in 1954, “can and must make of man a negative experience, lived in the form of hate and aggression.” It was Bataille’s peculiar genius to suggest that eroticism, taken to its most extreme limits in sado-masochistic practices, was a uniquely creative way to grapple with otherwise unconscious and unthinkable aspects of this “negative experience,” turning it into something positive, enabling a person to “say yes” in the spirit of Nietzsche -- even to a recurrent fantasy of death.
One of the things I like about Hinduism is how they seem to be more aware of the dark side of human nature. Kali may be a dark and scary goddess, but she is still an important figure in the Hindu pantheon of gods and goddesses. You deny Kali at your own risk. The other day when the Giants won their third championship in five years, there was the usual rioting in the Mission District -- people burned things (anything they could find) in the street and threw bottles at the police. Last time they burned a transit bus. Everyone attributed it to “a few troublemakers.” More or less the same thing happens whenever the usual restraints of civilized life are weakened by some political or criminal or natural event. The “few troublemakers” are like opportunistic bacteria, always latent, always waiting for an opportunity to do their thing. If you want to think of them as “demonic” then the “demonic” is always with us, like poverty.
In a story I read once (I thought it was Chrome Yellow by Aldus Huxley but I was mistaken, and now I don't know what it was), a secondary character instigates or carries out an anarchistic or terrorist act -- not for any political reason but -- because he imagines that by doing something truly demonic he will get to see the "Face" of the Devil, which will logically prove the existence of God. If you have a less Manichean view of things, confirming the demonic, or the dark, side of your daemon, really just tells us something about the nature of god/nature/reality.
Currently, the dangerous Tenderloin neighborhood here is undergoing unprecedented change, with Tech businesses and Tech money coming in to re-develop and revitalize buildings and eventually, some hope, entire streets. Others hate this “gentrification” as it drives out the people who have lived here for so long. Some of those unhappy about the changes argue that the unfortunates living there should he assisted to improve their lives rather than being forced out to make way for rich techies. The problem with this notion is that the people who have been living in the Tenderloin, for the most part, like it the way it is -- a jungle-land outside of civilization where the strong can prey on the weak and people can do as they please. The area isn’t rundown because of failures in infrastructure and social support networks, it's rundown because that suits, and reflects the character of, many (but not all of) the residents.
I’m largely in favor of the changes being made and less than impressed by the complaints of the residents being forced out. But, at the same time, I worry about denying so completely that aspect of human behavior. Kali is not a reasonable goddess. Like eliminating every natural predator of man (except man), completely civilizing the urban environment involves ecological risks. And who am I to say that behaviors and lifestyles I don’t care for don’t deserve to exist? Though it is amusing to see petty human predators (jackals) whining when bigger (economic) predators (lions) push them around.
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