The thirst for annihilation An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to his writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land’s book an attempt to appropriate Bataille’s writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse—rather, it is written as a communion. Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object but Bataille’s writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution—the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation. Nick Land, whose aim is to spread what he calls ‘the virulent horror’ of Bataille’s writings, himself writes with a vividness and commitment more usually associated with works of literature than intellectual investigations. This book is of relevance to everyone interested in the philosophy of desire, the psychopathology of deviance, political and legal theory, the history of religion or poetry. It is also urgent for all those intrigued by their sexual torments or the death they mistakenly conceive of as their own. Nick Land is a lecturer in Continental Philosophy at Warwick University. The thirst for annihilation Georges Bataille and virulent nihilism (an essay in atheistic religion) Nick Land London and New York First published in 1992 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1992 Nick Land All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Land, Nick, 1962– The thirst for annihilation: Georges Bataille and virulent nihilism: an essay in atheistic religion/Nick Land, p. cm. 1. Bataille, Georges, 1897–1962—Philosophy. 2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900—Influence. 3. Nihilism (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Atheism in literature. I. Title. PQ2603.A695Z74 1992 848’.91209–dc20 91–36365 CIP ISBN 0-203-41190-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-22352-7 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-05607-1 (Print Edition) 0-415-05608-X (pbk) The profundity of the tragic artist lies in this, that his aesthetic instinct surveys the more remote consequences, that he does not halt shortsightedly at what is closest to hand, that he affirms the large-scale economy which justifies the terrifying, the evil, the questionable— and more than merely justifies them [N III 575]. there is nothing except the impossible and not God [III 47]. Zero is immense. Contents Reference codes vi Preface vii 1 ‘The death of sound philosophy’ 1 2 The curse of the sun 19 3 Transgression 41 4 Easter 53 5 Dead God 57 6 The rage of jealous time 65 7 Fanged noumenon (passion of the cyclone) 74 8 Fluent bodies (a digression on Miller) 86 9 Aborting the human race 95 10 The labyrinth 114 11 Inconclusive communication 131 Notes 151 Bibliography 154 Name index 158 Subject index 161 Reference codes Wherever a reference consists of a Roman numeral followed by an Arabic one it indicates a volume and page number in Bataille’s Oeuvres Complètes. Other collected works are indicated by an initial letter or letters, followed by the same key. These are: A Aquinas B Boltzmann H Hegel K Kant L Lukács N Nietzsche S Sade Sch Schopenhauer Other codes refer to specific texts rather than collected works: Cap Marx, Capital Volume One CG Augustine, The City of God Ch Gleick, Chaos DH Walker, The Decline of Hell Gr Marx, Grundrisse Hay Hayman, De Sade PCD Plato, Collected Dialogues PES Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Pol Aristotle, Politics R Rimbaud, Collected Poems SD Ragon, The Space of Death Spu Derrida, Spurs TC Miller, The Tropic of Cancer TE Cioran, La Tentation d’Exister Preface As though to give yourself a certain ‘positive’ assurance, which harbored as well a suspicion of superiority, you have often reproached me for what you call my ‘appetite for destruction’ [TE 113]. The reasons for writing a book can be led back to the desire to modify the relations which exist between a human being and its kind. Those relations are judged unacceptable and are perceived as an atrocious wretchedness. However, to the extent that I have written this book I have been conscious that it is impotent to regulate the account of that wretchedness. Up to a certain limit, the desire for perfectly clear human exchanges which escape general conventions becomes a desire for annihilation [II 143]. * * * I have always unconsciously sought out that which will beat me down to the ground, but the floor is also a wall. * * * What best befits an author is to preface a work with its apology, ornamenting it with the gilt of necessity. After all, one should not beg attention without excuse. That a writer provide some rudimentary justification for a book seems a modest enough expectation, but such a demand obliterates me, since this is a text which has been reared in perfect superfluity, clutching feebly at zero. There is not a single sentence which is other than a gratuitousness and a confusion; a cry at least half lamed and smothered in irony. Each appeal that is made to the name ‘Bataille’ shudders between a pretension and a joke. Bataille. I know nothing about him. His obsessions disturb me, his ignorances numb me, I find his thought incomprehensible, the abrasion of his writing shears uselessly across my inarticulacy. In response I mumble, as a resistance to anxiety, maddening myself with words. Locked in a cell with my own hollow ravings…but at least it is not that…(and even now I lie)… In truth, Bataille seems to me far less an intellectual predicament than a sexual and religious one, transecting the lethargic suicide upon which we are all embarked. To accept his writings is an impossibility, to resist them an irrelevance. One is excited abnormally, appalled, but without refuge. Nausea perhaps? Such melodrama comes rapidly to amuse (although we still vomit, just as we die). So I try to persuade myself that it would have been relatively straightforward to write a sound book on the work of Georges Bataille; a book that would have discussed the contribution he has made to the philosophical and literary culture of twentieth-century France, expositing his doctrines of ‘general economy’, ‘base materialism’, and ‘atheology’, appraising the excellences of his various prose styles and his poetry, recommending that his works be invested by serious reading, scholarship, and eventually a judicious estimation—by my reckoning, a schlecht book. Such books are always depressing enough, but in the case of Georges Bataille the situation is even more acute, touching on something akin to the pure pornography characterizing our contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. To succeed in writing a book of any kind about Bataille is already something wretched, because it is only in the twisted interstitial spaces of failure that contact, infection, and—at the limit—the anegoic intimacy that he calls ‘communication’ can take place. A recovery of the sense of Bataille’s writing is the surest path to its radical impoverishment. It is as pathetic to seek education from Bataille as it is to seek comfort from Nietzsche. (Bataille is, of course, somewhat more honest than this about his own hypocrisies.) There is no doubt that to season Bataille in preparation for his comfortable digestion by capital’s cultural machine is a piece of twisted prostitution of the kind he would fully have appreciated. The delicious obscenity! A writer who tried to help us to expend, stored away with all the others in our reserve of informaticofinancial assets, in order to be pimped out into the career flows of the Western academies. There are North Americans who have already learnt to gurgle ‘Bataille contra Marx’ for instance, although the issue is rarely this inanely ideological. More insidious is the ‘he was a librarian you know’ Bataille, increasingly snarledup in the deconstructivist pulp industry of endless commentary on Logocentrism, Western Metaphysics, and other various Seinsvergessenheiten, the Bataille who read a lot, and had something very clever to say. Bataille may be praised or condemned in terms of his erudition, but this scarcely matters when compared with his sanctity as a voyager in sickness…but books make good burrows in which to hide, and few places are as redolent of the little escape as a library; the shelves of fiction, history, geography, each book a pretext for derealization, patiently awaiting the moment when it will be coupled to some vague reverie. Not that this book makes any special pleading for itself, it has scratched about for needles in the most destitute gutters of the Earth, cold-turkey crawling on its knees, and begging the academy to pimp it ever deeper into abuse. Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidinoeconomic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner. Who cares what ‘anyone’ thinks, knows, or theorizes about Bataille? The only thing to try and touch is the intense shock-wave that still reaches us along with the textual embers…for as long, that is, as anything can still ‘reach us’. Where Descartes needed God to mediate his relations with his fellows, secular man is happy with his television set, and with all the other commodified channels of pseudo- communication with which his civilization has so thoughtfully endowed him. Such things are for his own protection of course; to filter out the terrifying threat of infection. If openness to alterity, base communication, and experimental curiosity are marks of an exuberant society, its only true gauge lies in its tendency to be decimated by sexually transmitted diseases and nihilist religion. On this basis it seems that our society, despite its own most strenuous efforts, has not yet consummated its long idealized sclerosis into impermeable atoms. The grit still exists, and it is only amongst the grit that we connect. * * * It is 03.30 in the morning. Let us say one is ‘drunk’—an impoverished cipher for all those terrible things one does to one’s nervous-system in the depths of the night—and philosophy is ‘impossible’ (although one still thinks, even to the point of terror and disgust). What does it mean for this episode in the real history of spirit to die without trace? Where has it strayed to? ‘I thought of death, which I imagined to be similar to that walk without an object (but the walk, in death, takes this path without reason— “forever’’)’ [III 286]. An extraordinary lucidity, frosty and crisp in the blackness, but paralysed; lodged in some recess of the universe that clutches it like a snare. A wave of nausea is accompanied by a peculiarly insinuating headache, as if thought itself were copulating unreservedly with suffering. A damp coldness, close to fog, creeps through the open window. I laugh, delighted at the fate that has turned me into a reptile. The metallic hardness of intellect seems like a cutting instrument in my hand; the detached fragment from a machine tool, or an abattoir, seeking out the terminal sense it was always refused. The object of philosophy, insofar as the reflective meditation upon thought can be taken to characterize it, is arbitrarily prescribed as undisturbed reasoning (the cases of psychopathology, psychiatry, abnormal psychology, etc. do not remotely contravene this rigorous selection, because such studies of disturbed thought are constituted—in principle—without entanglement). It is thus that successfully adapted, tranquil, moderate, and productive reason monopolizes the philosophical conception of thought, in the same way that the generalized robotism of regulated labour squeezes all intense gestures out of social existence. My abnormal devotion to Bataille stems from the fact that nobody has done more than he to obstruct the passage of violent blanks into a pacified oblivion, and thus to awaken the monster in the basement of reason. Not that the repressed is locked in a dungeon, it is stranded in a labyrinth, and connected to the daylit world by a secret continuity. A tangle of confusion comes to seem like a door, a maze like a barrier, and one says ‘I’, but the inside is not a cell, it is a corridor; a passage cut from the soft rock of loss. Inner experience traverses a sombre porosity, and the moans of the minotaur reverberate through its arteries, hinting at an indefinable proximity. It becomes difficult to sleep. * * * Of course, I indulge myself, in innumerable ways. ‘I’ tell myself the personal pronoun fails to mark the pseudo-neutral position of a commentator this time. That is rather a protraction of ‘Bataille’s’ incessant je into a further episode of debasement. For it is remarkable how degraded a discourse can become when it is marked by the obsessive reiteration of the abstract ego, mixing arrogance with pallid humility. The chronic whine that results—something akin to a degenerated reverberation from Dostoyevsky’s underground man—is the insistence of a humanity that has become an unbearable indignity. ‘I’ am (alone), as the tasteless exhibition of an endogenous torment, as the betrayal of communication, as a festering wound, in which the monadic knitting of the flesh loses itself in a mess of pus and scabs, etc. etc.…(You yawn of course, but I continue.) Yes, I am—definitionally—a filthy beggar (like God), scrabbling at the coat- tails of a reluctant and embarrassed attentiveness, driven into a guile that fuses wretchedness with an elusive element of threat. Is it mere indolence that defeats all tendency towards decorous impersonality? Scarcely. Or rather; I cannot bring myself to think so. I nag at the margins of this discourse on the writings of Georges Bataille as a hideous confirmation of its cowardice and moderation, simultaneous with the dreariness of its prostitution; a wheezing parody of laughter teetering upon the abject nakedness of a sob. Yet at the same time it scarcely matters whether I write of Bataille or myself. If there is a boundary between us it is only insofar as he was momentarily frustrated in his passage to the truth of his text.