Norman Oliver Brown. Dionysus in 1990

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Norman Oliver Brown. Dionysus in 1990:


A lecture for the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, given on October 3, 1990.

From:

Brown, Norman Oliver. Apocalypse And/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley - Los Angeles – Oxford: University of California Press, 1992. 200 p. – Pages 179-200.

Contemplating the collapse of "actually existing socialism" in 1990, and dissenting from the opinion that we are witnessing the triumph of liberal capitalism and the end of history, in what post-Marxist terms can we begin to rethink the premises of a future science of political economy? Does the apparent triumph of capitalism mean the worldwide triumph of consumerism coupled with capitalism's ability to deliver the goods, or does it require a fundamental reconsideration of what do human beings really want?
In my first exuberant surge of premature post-Marxist energy (Life Against Death, 1959), I wagered my intellectual life on the idea of finding in Freud what was missing in Marx. I found in Freud's analysis of the pathological dimension in human desires the basis for a post-Marxist critique of capitalism. Life Against Death, chapter 15, "Filthy Lucre": the amazing Freudian discovery of the connection between money and anality. My Marxist background had given me a healthy prejudice against moneymaking. Imagine my excitement when I discovered Sandor Ferenczi's article called "The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money"; with its immortal conclusion, "After what has been said money is seen to be nothing other than deodorized, dehydrated shit that has been made to shine."1 "Nothing other than": it is the exaggeration which grabbed me. Years later I discovered the epigram of Theodor Adorno, "In psychoanalysis the only true thing is the exaggerations.'' That I now recognize as the cornerstone of a Dionysian epistemology.
The turn to Freud was irreversible; but where it led to was surprising. Love's Body (1966) begins with "Freud . . .," and ends with "there is only poetry." It was as if the change of direction taken from Freud, resolutely pursued, in the end dictated a massive breakdown of categories of traditional "rationality" still accepted as authoritative by both Marx and Freud; that massive breakdown of traditional categories of rationality which Nietzsche baptized with the name of Dionysus. Already the last chapter in Life Against Death, not really knowing what it was saying, proposes "Dionysian consciousness" as a ''way out."
What does it mean to take one's stand under the Dionysian, rather than the Freudian (or the Marxist) flag? It means to discard the pseudo-scientific posture of clinical detachment or political rationality, and recognize madness as the universal human condition, not the distinctive stigma of a separate class distinguished as insane. It means that madness is not an individual but a social phenomenon in which we all participate collectively: we are all in one and the same boat or body. It means also that madness is inherent in life and in order to live with it we must learn to love it. That is the point of honoring it with the name of a god. "Our greatest blessings," says Socrates in the Phaedrus, "come to us by way of madness-provided," he adds, "that the madness comes from a god" (see above, Chapter 1).
"Dionysus, the god of madness, is also death" (Heraclitus). Ever since I read Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle I have pursued the idea that Life against Death, Eros and Thanatos, were the ultimate terms in which to think about human behavior, or "the psychoanalytical meaning of history." At the same time it was clear to me even in Life Against Death that at that deep level which can only be expressed in myth or metaphor, Freud's "instinct theory" needed to be remythologized in terms of Dionysus, that is to say in terms of instinctual dialectics rather than instinctual dualism. Or, to use another metaphor, in terms of Heraclitus rather than Empedocles. In his last, characteristically obstinate reaffirmation of his "dualistic theory, according to which an instinct of death, destruction or aggression claims equal
partnership with Eros""Analysis, Terminable and Interminable," 1937Freud expresses his delight to find himself returning to pre-Socratic forms of thought, and identifies his pre-Socratic precursor as Empedocles, who conceived of the world-process as a constant battle, with alternating supremacy, between two principles forever in conflict with each other, named philia, love, and neikos, strife.
We are once amoreonce amor, once à mort, thank heaven!in a world made fresh for fundamental metaphors; where it makes all the difference, the difference between Life and Death, whether one goes with Empedocles or with Heraclitus; a difference dawning on me with new light in this year of 1990. Only in this year of 1990, exhilarated by the Dionysian manifestations of new life in Eastern Europereplaying or redeploying, this time to more general acclaim, the Dionysian manifestations in Western Europe in 1968soon, very soon, says the chorus in Euripides' Bacchae, the whole world will join the dance. Also only in 1990 for the first time hearing clearly the testimony of that fellow traveler on the Dionysian path, Georges Bataille. Already in 1947 Bataille had been mad enough to offer a Dionysian interpretation of an earlier turning point in the history of the twentieth century: "Truman would appear to be blindly fulfilling the prerequisites for the finaland secret apotheosis. It will be said that only a madman could perceive such things in the Marshall and Truman plans. I am that madman.''2
Georges Bataille in appropriately unruly ways bears precious testimony to the need for a Dionysian transvaluation of the Freudian revolution. The style and the stance is as significant as the substance. His 1939 manifestowhen his lifelong obsession with violent death had been transfigured by the advent of World War II"The Practice of Joy Before Death"with its prefatory motto taken from Nietzsche: "All this I am, and I want to be: at the same time dove, serpent, and pig"and the concluding "Her-aclitean Meditation," beginning I MYSELF AM WARcovers with exemplary candor and directness ground laboriously crawled in Love's Body.3
I am reminded of Freud's concluding gesture at the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: "What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping."
Bataille helped me to reformulate the difference between Freudian dualism and the Dionysian or Heraclitean principle of the unity of opposites. Both Bataille and Freud find themselves once more on the terrain of pre-Socratic mythologization, finding it necessary to tell a story about the origin of life in order to account for human sexuality in general, and in particular to give the necessary weight and earnestness to the various, mysterious, and frightening phenomena gathered together under the name of masochism.
Freud summarizes his doctrine in the (pre-Socratic style) aphorism "The goal of all life is death," and mythologizes an origin of life resulting from a disturbance in an originally inanimate condition of matter, a condition to which all forms of animate (organic or living) matter seek to return. Thus in Freud the emphasis is on psychic entropy, elevated to a cosmic principle, "the urge of animate matter to return to an inanimate state." The entropic emphasis was aggravated by Freud's negative, homeostatic interpretation of the pleasure-principle"Pleasure is in some way connected with lessening, lowering or extinguishing the amount of stimulation present in the mental apparatus." The opposition to all forms of violent or excessive pleasure, implicitly condemned as counterproductive or pathological, is plain. The good bourgeois principle of self-preservation, and the good rational (Apollonian) principle of moderation are in command. The ironical effect, as Freud came later to realize, is to place the pleasure-principle, which Lucretius had celebrated as dux vitae, the guide to life, entirely at the service of the death instinct: it becomes, Freud says, a Nirvana-principle, aiming at the reduction of the "throbbing energy of life" to the lowest possible level.4 The whole picture depends on a nineteenth-century fixation on a distinction between animate and inanimate "matter"; as a product of the times, it is not really intelligible without assuming some fin-de-siècle weariness with life, aggravated by the trauma of World War I.
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormy seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.
That Copernican revolution which Freud thought he was inaugurating, by showing that the human ego is not even master in its own house, is not complete until the human ego is forced to admit another master, the Dionysian principle of excess; Nietzsche called it drunkenness. It takes a madman like Bataille, and a libertine like Bataille, to challenge the homeostatic pleasure-principle in terms of another definition of pleasure and another definition of life. In Bataille's Heraclitean vision we are suffering not from some repressed longing for death but from excess of lifethe Dionysian principle of excess, Blake's principle of exuberance. There is a contradiction built into the pleasure-principle: there is no such thing as satis-faction; there is no such thing as "enough." There is a built-in need for toomuchness, for flamboyance (flaming), for exaggeration (Love's Body, Chapter 15). That is why, in the last resort, there is only poetry. We cannot live without imagination; adorning and exaggerating life; lavishing of itself in change. This property of the imagination is not a human aberration, but a manifestation of the fundamental nature of life. So far from there being, as Freud assumed, a fundamental tendency to stability, Bataille says,
The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.5
Already Freud, for example in "The Economic Problem of Masochism," had envisaged the distribution and discharge (expenditure) of sexual energy on the model of the classical (closed) system of economics. Bataille's vision assimilated biological energy to the explosive character of solar and cosmic energy on the one hand, and on the other to the explosive character of human energy as manifested in economic developmentthat explosion which leads from paleolithic food-gathering to the Industrial Revolution of the last century, and to whatever lies ahead in the next. The movement of energy on the earthfrom geophysics to political economy, by way of sociology, history, and biologyall manifests that universal effervescence of superfluous prodigality which is best honored as a god or as God. Science becomes religious in deference to the awesome facts.
The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
As in Love's Body (Chapter 10, ''Fire"), and whatever the laws of thermodynamics may say, Bataille finds in Heraclitean Fire the best metaphor for the universal unity of eternal creation and eternal destructionBlake's tiger burning. I still can do no better than quote the scripture that is authoritative for me: Gerard Manley Hopkins saying "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection." Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit priest and poet, leaping over the distance separating Christianity and pre-Socratic paganism. And Goethe; in the West-östlicher Divanthe "Western-Eastern Divan,"leaping over the distance separating ''western" from "eastern" civilization. Goethe, one of the greatest spirits of "Western Civilization,'' writing in the spirit of, in imitation of, one of the greatest spirits of Islam, the fourteenth-century Sufi master, Hafiz of Shiraz, the Dionysian poet of intoxication and unappeasable passion.
Das Lebendge will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.
Celebrating life, life that longs for death by fire. Goethe is not less the scientist for being a Sufi. Love is all fire; and so Heaven and Hell are the same place. Satan is the primordial Sufi, the model of the perfect monotheist and lover, who, cursed by God, accepts this curse as a robe of honor, preferring eternal separation willed by the beloved to the union for which he longs.6 Why is this mystic or Dionysian consciousness so rare? What Bataille called the "apotheosis of the perishable"; what Goethe called the law of Stirb und werde, die to live.7
Bataille's special contribution is to show the connection between the mystic vision, "the apotheosis of the perishable," and the economic system. In so doing, he gave us a first sketch of that post-Marxist science of political economy which is the crying need of this hour of 1990, in his book La Part Maudite, first published in 1949; first published in translation, The Accursed Share (Zone Books), in 1988. The idea-nucleus was outlined in a short article in the anti-Stalinist Marxist review edited by Boris Souvarine, La Critique Sociale, January 1933; in translation, "The Notion of Expenditure," in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, 1985.
The key move in Bataille's transvaluation of economic value is to deflect the traditional Marxist notion of a "surplus" by connecting it with the Dionysian notion of life as the manifestation of a universal principle of excess. The whole notion of "surplus" then begins to waver: if there is no distinction between necessary and wasteful expenditure, if there is a necessity to waste, where is the "surplus"? The focus shifts from modes of production to modes of unproductive expenditure; from production to consumption; unnecessary, unconditional, exuberant, i.e., wasteful consumption. This perspective liberates us from the necessity of having to take "growth" as the self-evident destiny of all economic activity, and from the necessity of taking "demand," or desire manifested in the marketplace, as the ultimate and unquestionable indicator of human needs. Pandora's box, what do human beings really want, is open. It always has been open; now our eyes are opened. We can no longer continue with the conventional Marxist distinction between economic base, governed by technological rationality and economic necessity ("relations of production"), and ideological superstructures identified with a ruling class. A Marxist view of history shows a (loose) distinction between a class or classes that produce a surplus, and a class or classes that play games with it, games of war, religion, art, etc.; Bataille shows how the social structure is for the sake of these games, and not for the sake of productivity. Freud sees everywhere compromise formations in the eternal contest between Eros and Thanatos; Bataille suggests that Eros and Thanatos are one.
Just as Freud can bring out of darkness into light a whole sector of human irrationality by means of a single case history, Bataille focuses on the institution of potlatch, the gift-giving institution which energized and organized the prodigious economic life of the Indians of the Northwest Coast.
pot-latch also pot-lach [Chinook Jargon, fr. Nootka patshatl giving, gift] 1: a ceremonial feast or festival of the Indians of the northwest coast given for the display of wealth to validate or advance individual tribal position or social status and marked by the host's lavish destruction of personal property and an ostentatious distribution of gifts that entails elaborate reciprocation.
First reported by Boas at the end of the nineteenth century, in the 1920s Marcel Mauss made potlatch a key instance of archaic gift-giving, taken by him as the key to an archaic mode of establishing human reciprocity and solidarity, antecedent and corresponding to the modern institution of the contract. Developing Mauss's idea of the socializing effect of gift-giving, Levi-Strauss in the 1940s explained the incest taboo and kinship systems in general as based on the primordial gift of women. In the 1970s Mauss's view of the role of gift-giving in archaic economies was updated and given currency in Anglo-American academic anthropology by Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics. All these interpretations see in archaic gift-giving an organizing principle of human solidarity more primitive than, and antithetical to, the modern institutions of contract or (egoistic, acquisitive) barter in the market place. As Marshall Sahlins showed, the underlying psychological assumption is the Hobbesian assumption of innate human aggressive tendencies, leading to the war of everyman against everyman, unless contradicted by an institution which elaborately denies the innate aggressive tendencies and lays the basis for rational reciprocity. "It is the triumph of human rationality over the folly of war." The gift lays the foundation of human culture, by the repression of human nature.8
The human tendency that Bataille sees at work in the potlatch is not aggression but death: the need to lose, the need to spend, to give away, to surrender; the need to sacrifice; the need for ruin. Power is the ability to lose. Wealth was accumulated in order to be sacrificed, in a solemn competition for prestige, in which rival chiefs staked their whole being, for the purpose of challenging, humiliating, and obligating the other. The rivalry even entailed the return of a greater gift, i.e., a return with interest; in order to get even the giver must not only redeem himself by repayment, but must also in his turn impose "the power of the gift" on his rival.9 The analogy with dashes between rival male animals in the rutting season is unmistakable; in the notion of "expenditure," sexuality and economics cannot be separated. One of the potlatch tribes called their festival ''killing wealth." Slaves were killed. Chiefs burned their own houses. Emblazoned copper bars, worth a fortune, were broken in pieces or thrown into the sea. Bataille notes the relevance of psychoanalytic interpretations insisting on the primordial connection between excrement and jewelry, between the worthless and priceless, between anal eroticism and anal sadism. In Melanesia the donor designates as his excrement magnificent gifts, which he deposits at the feet of the rival chief.10
The game that is played with the surplus is gambling, with a built-in risk of self-destruction, a built-in need for competition, and a built-in demand for new goods to replenish the store and be in turn destroyed (as in "planned obsolescence"). A need for hemorrhage is built into the system. "This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism" (Schumpeter).11 The whole thing amounts to a masochistic game of playing with fire, or Russian roulette playing with death or bankruptcy; The Bonfire of the Vanities. The best, full-blooded account of potlatch as an integral element in the culture of the Kwakiutl Indians is in Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. Ruth Benedict notes that "the manipulation of wealth on the Northwest Coast is clearly enough in many ways a parody of our own economic arrangements."12 Her whole interpretation is based on the idea that here we can see what Nietzsche meant by Dionysian. (L. Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property [New York, 1979], is an interesting discussion of the analogies between gift-giving and poetry; but he sees too little of the dark side of Dionysus, in spite of having written on John Berryman; and too little of the self-destructive side of potlatch. Following Mauss and Sahlins, he is too romantic in his antithesis between gift-giving and poetry on the one hand and capitalistic profit-taking on the other; as if it were an antithesis between life and death. He needs, as I needed, some influence from Bataille.)
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In 1990, with the need to rethink the foundations of economics so clearly urgent, Bataille tells us that the problem is not the production of wealth, nor even its distribution, but consumption; unproductive expenditure. What are we to do with the surplus, the toomuchness we produce? What do human beings really want?
In The Accursed Share Bataille gets away from the traditional Marxist sequence of modes of production. The human sacrifices of Aztecs, Islamic jihad, Tibetan monasteries of Buddhist contemplation, as well as potlatch, are all seen as alternative ways of obeying the imperative social need to squander wealth. They all illustrate the connection between the problem of disposing of the economic surplus and the institutions of religion; "Religion is the satisfaction that a society gives to the use of its excess resources, or rather to their destruction.''13 That intimate connection is enigmatically displayed in the word "sacrifice"as if the proper thing to do with the economic surplus (painfully accumulated by economic sacrifices) is to give it away; and as if gods exist to receive iti.e., that religion is essentially the theater of masochism.
It is enough to make one fear for the future of humanity, after the death of God. The scholar of one candle feels afraid. Protestantism-capitalism carried the masochistic logic inherent in religion to a new and higher level, piercing the soul far more deeply than any Roman Catholic penitential exercises, while at the same time making the religious solution to the problem of masochism no longer viable. Liberal capitalismthe world run as a purely secular business propositiondepends on a religious revolution which it can neither repudiate nor live with. Luther and Calvin legitimated a desacralization of human life on a scale which took the ground from under conspicuous consumption conceived as for the glory of God. At the same time it inculcated an ascetic abstention of enjoyment, the worthlessness of the things of this world, which still hopelessly confuses both public policy and private pleasures. The glorification of God by the nullification of man carries the masochistic potential of religion to a new level: our nullification, our humiliation as worthless creatures in the sight of God, is our sanctification. After the death of God the theology of human nullity becomes the pathology of nihilism.
Capitalism has proven itself more dynamici.e., Dionysian than socialism. Its essential nature is to be out of control: exuberant energy, exploiting every opportunity, to extract a surplus. That is what free enterprise means. We can (masochistically) lament forces beyond our control, but the self-destructive, ruinous process goes on. Death and Dionysus get their due, deny them as we may. "If we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us: it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion."14 The schizophrenic symbiosis of spendthrift symbolic projects with a mainline dynamic of thrifty accumulation aggravates the situation. Appeals for conservation or limits to growth are only futile additions to the discordant noise, the Dionysian tumult of modern times; as long as we refuse to recognize the divinity of the mad god, as long as we go on kidding ourselves that man is a rational (Apollonian) animal. The forces not of production but of waste ful destruction have been unleashed and will not get back into the cage.
It is an open question what difference a more realistic view of human nature, call it psychoanalytical awareness or Dionysian consciousness, would make. The excess, says Bataille, must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically; it is not so easy as bourgeois or clerical optimists have imagined to distinguish gloriously from catastrophically; or to avoid both by opting for "comfort." This world was, is, and always will be, ever-living fire. It will never be a safe place; it will never be a pastoral scene of peace and pleasure, luxe calme et volupté, Baudelaire's utopian image invoked by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization.15 Traces of this misleading light disfigure the last chapter of Life Against Death. The dichotomy between pleasure and pain is socially constructed to make the economy work.
But one does not have to have utopian dreams of a peaceful or even a "better" future in order to recognize the historical exigencies, the demands of Eros, of Life, at this particular moment. The human race is facing the problem of consumption in a new way, a way that forces us to ask in a new way the question, what do human beings really want. There is a hidden harmony between the advent of Freud and the crisis of capitalism. "In the propitious darkness a new truth turns stormy" (Bataille).16
The new truth that cannot be avoided is the advent of the spendthrift masses, the advent of that new era designated in Finnegans Wake by the letters HCE: Here Comes Everybody. It is a truth promoted by socialist ideology (the "mass line") and capitalist reality. Ascetic intellectuals (I am one of them), schooled in cultural criticism by such models of resistance as Herbert Marcuse, have assailed mass consumerism as "repressive desublimation," controlled by a ruling class in order to "buy off" potentially revolutionary discontent. In this way Marcuse was able to combine (utopian) political radicalism with cultural elitism: the sacred heart of radicalism was located in great works of Art. But in the era of Here Comes Everybody, ascetic intellectuals have to rejoin the human race. Pushpin may be as good as poetry. A new age now begins. We will, as Euripides says in the Bacchae, have to submit to the verdict of the common man.17 The dependence of the world economy on mass consumption, and the intrusion of mass demands for consumer goods, to the frustration of the best-laid plans of the Central Committee, are the most hopeful signs in the most recent events (1988-1990). "His producers are they not his consumers?" (Finnegans Wake.) "Here Comes Everybody" means that the human race is getting ready to discard the (childish, Oedipal) game whereby the mass of Slaves left the mystery (the burden, the guilt) of surplus consumption to their Masters. It would be something new in world history, something like an apocalyptic novelty, if our social and economic arrangements came to reflect a collective consensus that we are all members of one body, with a collective problem of surplus production and surplus consumption. There is no other way out of the flagrant maldistribution, and the futile quest for justice.
All economies are systems of mutual interdependence. The Dionysian energy of the free enterprise market economy, like the potlatch economy of the Kwakiutl, is a violent assertion of interdependence in the negative form of mutual competition and aggression; under these circumstances addictive self-abuse becomes the only outlet for the need for self-abandon, and whole economies become organized round the traffic in drugs. That strengthening of the forces of Eros for which Freud prayed might create new institutions of individual generosity and public joy such as the world has not seen since Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. (Beethoven said Freude, not Freiheit, but they are the same thing. Freedom remains an empty abstraction until it is returned to its root meaning, jouissance. "Fredome mays [= 'makes'] man to haiff liking." Anglo-Saxon freo means both "free" and "joyful.'' It all comes from Freyja, the Teutonic Venus, the goddess of sexuality, and Friday. Bacchus is Liber; liberty is lust, libido.18) Gift-giving, a primary manifestation of Dionysian exuberance, might be able to revel in its own intrinsic self-sacrificial nature, instead of being inhibited and distorted, in bondage to primary social institutions of self-assertion. And public joy might manifest itself in carnivalesque extravaganzas uninhibited by the resentment of the exploited, the excluded, the deprived.
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Expelling God from the scientific exploration of the universe and the scientific management of the economy, human beings finally come face to face with the uncomfortable Dionysian realities of their own human nature. René Girard's book Violence and the Sacred, better known than Bataille's, looks into the Pandora's box opened by Bataille, in order to frighten us back into orthodox religion; Pope John Paul II really liked it.
After the death of Godthat external God to whom we (masochistically) surrendered the glory, saying Non nobis, Domine, not unto us, O Lorda gruesome Christian ritual. After victory in battle the triumphant army piously disclaims credit for the slaughter, saying they didn't do it; God did it. After the death of God, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World. "The unconditional splendor of material things" (Bataille). Bataille remains faithful to Marxist materialism; he speculates on the connection between his Blakean paradise and that utopian promise to replace the "government of men" with the "government of things.''19
Love calls us to the things of this world, and capitalism, like God, produces them in unprecedented variety, and glamour. It brought the Berlin Wall down. In this strange new world the masses move as strangers, exploring. Things in a strange way remain shadows, or estranged. The science of enjoyment which, as Ruskin said, has nothing to do with either the science of production, or the science of accumulation, still lies in the future.
Bataille says that everything that exists exists to be consumeda hard truth for Apollonian conservationism, saying "nothing in excess." It is because we do not know how to consume that so much energy is spent on accumulating excrement, or money, which cannot be consumed. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? (Isaiah 55:2). To really enjoy is to consume; consumption is the way separate beings communicate; and real consumption is inseparable from Dionysian violence; the consuming fire.
If I thus consume immoderately, I reveal to my fellow beings that which I am intimately:Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate. Everything shows through, everything is open and infinite between those who consume intensely. But nothing counts then; violence is released and it breaks forth without limits, as the heat increases.20
As in Love's Body, Chapter 9, "Food," Chapter 10, "Fire," Chapter 11, "Fraction." Fraction, the solemn moment of consecration, the breaking of the bread over the cup in the Communion. "The image of the tiger reveals the truth of eating" (Bataille); "to eat and to be eaten; this is union, since desire is beyond measure'' (John Ruysbroeck, the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic; but the original is in Euripides. Dionysus likes it raw).21 These are all metaphors to grasp the full reality of an embodied life of polymorphous bodily intercommunication, to contradict the spectral world of entertainment, and narcissistic dreams of pleasure without pain. (These metaphors apply even to such ''incorporeal" things as books. It is an approximation to the truth to see, with Milton, the Eucharist in every book consumption, the precious lifeblood of master spirit, treasured up for a life beyond life. It is a further step forward to see the cannibalism in the Eucharist. The Dionysian is strong enough to take responsibility: the meaning is her own. The book sets the reader on fire. The meaning is the fresh creation, the eruption of poetry; meaning is always surplus meaning, an excess extracted; the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness of Finnegans Wake.)
To be is to be vulnerable. Bataille is of no importance if he does not pierce us with fragments of this Dionysian truth.
The wound of incompleteness opens me up. Through what could be called incompleteness or animal nakedness or the wound, the different separate beings communicate, acquiring life by losing it in communication with each other.
The fate of finite beings leaves them at the edge of themselves. And this edge is torn.22
Bataille's originality is to have seen in erotic mysticism, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the key to a new science of economics. It is an attempt to go beyond Blake (I leave the text in all its original toomuchness):
The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence, and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity; but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds which have power to resist energy; according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.
Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring: to the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains; but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.
But the Prolific Would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer, as a sea, received the excess of his delights.
Some will say: "Is not God alone the Prolific?" I answer: "God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men."
These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies: whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.
Note: Jesus Christ did not wish to unite, but to seperate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats! & he says: "I came not to send Peace, but a Sword."
Messiah or Satan or Tempter was formerly thought to be one of the Antediluvians who are our Energies.23
The uncomfortable truth at the end of the roadthe road taken by the masochistic love of truthis the truth of masochism. The science of enjoyment is also a science of death; this Ruskin did not know. To speak in pre-Socratic style: it is a universal principle of biological life that growth leads to excess: and excess leads to laceration and loss.
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
Or in another style, the children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, cited by Susan Farr in the collection of lesbian S/M writing Coming to Power:
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real, you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,'' he asked, ''or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."24
Freud, often treated as a masculinist antagonist by feminists, always insisted on a special connection between masochism and femininity. Erotic mysticism has always known that the wound is the woman, and we are all not made whole until we are first wounded. "The wound of incompleteness opens me up." When the need to participate in mothering is institutionalized inside the family, there is the custom of couvade.
couvade fr. couver, cover to sit on (as a female bird on eggs): a custom among primitive peoples in many parts of the world in accordance with which when a child is born the father takes to his bed as if he himself had suffered the pains of childbirth, cares for the child, and submits himself to fasting, purification, or various taboos.
Baudrillard's critique of Marxist "productionism" and the fetishistic conceptualization of labor as the essence of human nature25 needs to be transformed by a deconstruction, that is to say Freudian resexualization, of the idea of labor; see above, Chapter 3, "My Georgics: A Palinode in Praise of Work." A palinode, revoking the celebration of "play"homo ludensin Life Against Death. Transform the nature of work, returning it to life, to labor, the labor of childbirth; making men into women, in our work. Painstaking work; couvade; spending. John Donne, "To His Mistris Going to Bed":
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
In the mysticism of the Moravian Brethren, who called themselves Unitas Fratrum, Christ's wounds are his womb, in which we are reborn.26 In London, in 1943, H.DH.D. leaped from her Moravian background into the poetic company of Ezra Pound, and into the psychoanalytical company of Freud (her Tribute to Freud)in London, in 1943, H.D. heard Christian Renatus saying:
Wound of Christ,
Wound of God,
Wound of Beauty,
Wound of Blessing
Wound of Poverty,
Wound of Peace
and it went on and on.27 Gift-giving, what Charles Williams in The Figure of Beatrice calls largessecourtesy, generosity, humility, charityis the woman's gift; that is what qualifies her in patriarchal structures to become the primordial object given, a poisoned gift (Pandora). Plato knows that the aim is "giving birth in beauty." Dante is taught that "if he is not afraid of an agony of sighs," he will come to the Beatricean moment and say, ''Love, true lord, behold thy handmaid, do what thou wilt." Ecce ancilla Domini, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum; the words of the Virgin Mary. His own soul is to be the feminine, the mother of Love. Here, in the first canzone of the Convivio, Charles Williams says, there is already proposed that mortal maternity of God which is fully exposed in the conclusion of the Paradiso.28 Teilhard de Chardin, in The Eternal Feminine, shows how far orthodox Christianity, in the twentieth century, can go in this direction.29
The developments in feminismincluding excesses, lacerations, splitshave brought us all, including feminists, face to face with Death. Jessica Benjamin, in The Bonds of Love, putting Bataille and The Story of O together, says, "We are as islands, connected yet separated by a sea of death. Eroticism is the perilous crossing of that sea."30 After Freud, human culture, in all of its interconnected aspects, private and public, is to be seen as an unending search for an accommodation, a modus vivendi, between Eros and Thanatos. Bataille's personal erotic excesses are potlatches. "In its cruelty, eroticism brings indigence, demands ruinous outlays.''31 The injunction of Spinoza stands: not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand.
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Political economy needs a theory of sacrifice; and sacrifice necessarily involves the sacred. The unconditional splendor of material things is accessible only to a newborn sense of religious awe; with Blake, saying everything lives; and everything that lives is holy. If the masses consolidate their presence on the stage of history, a new religion will emerge to take the place of the old religions administered by specialists in public consumption. It cannot be the obsolete Nature worship that conservationism is vainly trying to resuscitate. Consumption cannot not be sacrificial, and sacrifice cannot not be sacrilegious. Freud understood the "antithetical sense of primal words": the word sacer means both "sacred" and "accursed."32A sacred act must involve violence and rupture, breaking the boundary.
With any tangible reality, for each being, you have to find the place of sacrifice, the wound. A being can only be touched where it yields. For a woman, this is under her dress; and for a god it's on the throat of the animal being sacrificed.33
Human culture is human sacrifice. It is the truth of Actaeon; the wounded deer leaps highest. That heroical frenzy which was the life of Giordano Bruno; or Jimi Hendrix.
There is no telling how it will all turn out in the end. At the present moment, in this phase of exploration, the picture is confused by the novelty of the situation, the predominance of vicarious entertainment in the life of the masses, what Blake would call spectral enjoymenteverything on TV; the life-styles of the rich and famous offering vicarious participation in spectacles of waste; spectator sports offering vicarious agonistics; democracy restricted to mass voting for media stars. Not only bread but also circuses. It is not clear whether this half-hearted arrangement is an interregnum or the final solution. The Grand Inquisitor is betting that circuses will satisfy. The Dionysian bets the Grand Inquisitor is wrong.
We do not know to what degree individual excesses can be drowned in collective consciousness. Dionysian is a consciousness which does not need a ruling class or a divine scapegoat. Such strength can only be collective. Bataille says Christianity is left behind at the stage of exuberance; Blake did not think so. And Nietzsche said that the whole question was Dionysus versus Christ. Bataille himself could never free himself from the need for Christian pedagogy toward the sado-masochistic truth, the Suffering Servant. "I open my eyes on a world in which I have no meaning unless I'm wounded, torn apart and sacrificed, and in which divinity, in the same way, is just a tearing apart or being torn apart, is executing or being executed, is sacrifice."34 Christianity, except for the mystics who (violently) anticipate in their own bodies the final apotheosis, must always be a religion of vicarious redemption. It may well be that human beings can tolerate the Dionysian truth only if it is held at a distance, projected oto human or divine scapegoats, admitted under the sign of negation. Reality may be too much for us. We may, like Job, have uttered what we cannot understand.
The vision of exuberance requires identification with the exuberant life of the whole. Materialists must come to understand what Spinoza called the intellectual love of God. We do not know how far the human race can go in this direction. But there is no doubt in my mind that Spinoza was right in seeing the connection between that mystic vision and the concrete development of polymorphous intercommunication between all bodies; and the maximalization, to the greatest possible degree, of the communist principle: "Men, I say, can wish for nothing more excellent for the preservation of their being than that all should so agree in all things that the minds and bodies of all would compose, as it were, one mind and one body" (Ethics IV, 18, note). Spinoza was wrong in thinking that self-preservation could bring us to the mystical body. As it says in the Gospel, "Anyone who finds his own life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. "35 The notion of energy as self-destructive other, connected as well as separated by a sea of death; living each other's death, and dying each other's life.
Notes
1.S. Ferenczi, Sex in Psychoanalysis (New York, 1950), 327.
2.G. Bataille, The Accursed Share (New York, 1988), 190 and note 22.
3.C. Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed.A. Stoeki (Minneapolis, 1985), 235, 239.
4.S. Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York,1963), 365; Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," in Collected Papers (London, 1953), 2:255-268. Cf. Life Against Death, 88-89.
5.Bataille, Accursed Share, 21.
6.A. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, 1975),195.
7.Bataille Visions of Excess, 237.
8.M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972), 175.
9.Bataille, Accursed Share, 70.
10.Bataille, Visions of Excess, 119, 122.
11.J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 4th ed. (London, 1952), 83.
12.R. Benedict, Patterns of Culture (New York, 1946), 174.
13.Bataille, Accursed Share, 120.
14.Ibid., 24.
15.H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1955), 164.
16.Bataille, Accursed Share, 133.
17.Cf. N. 0. Brown, Closing Time (New York, 1973), 119.
18.R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (New York,1973), 472-476.
19.Bataille, Accursed Share, 135-141.
20.Ibid., 58-59.
21.Cf. M. Idel, Kabbalah, New Perspectives (New Haven, 1988),70.
22. G. Bataille, Guilty (San Francisco, 1988), 27, 154.
23.W. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 16.
24.S. Farr, "The Art of Discipline," in ed. Samois, Coming to Power (Boston, 1981), 188.
25.J. Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis, 1975), 33-41.
26.N. Hall and W. R. Dawson, Broodmales (Dallas, 1989), 26.
27.H.D. The Gift (New York, 1982), 141.
28.C. Williams, The Figure of Beatrice (New York, 1983), 57-58, 61.
29.Cf. H. de Lubac, The Eternal Feminine: A Study on the Poem by Teilhard de Chardin (New York, 1971).
30.J. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York, 1988), 63.
31.Bataille, Guilty, 22.
32.Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 187.
33.Bataille, Guilty, 26.
34.Bataille, Guilty, 45.
35.Cf. Love's Body, 161.

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