GEORGE BATAILLE AND THE MASOCHIST ETHICS OF (THE LOVE OF) ANGUISH:

Carlon Robbins

PHIL 6050-001

Kent Brintnall, PhD.

Department of Religious Studies

UNC Charlotte

May 2012
 “A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me,
a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.
I have a mad impulse to smash something,
a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral,
or myself, to commit outrages...”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Central to the work of Georges Bataille is a perpetual critique of power structures and the

tendencies toward system building that anchor subjects in the realm of utility and objectification.

By these later terms is meant the everyday world in which human beings project themselves as

individual agents carrying out tasks of production, calculation, accumulation, and the

maintenance of separation between self and other. Everyday activities thus casts the notions of

self into the understanding of reality—composed of subjects and objects, which also entails, by

extension, temporality—divided into past, present, and future. These moves and activities are set

in a world in which humans project themselves into the future by operating in and on the world

of objects, as independent, even transcendent, masters of the objects (natural resources and

others who are socially stratified according to systematic organization of labor) with the

multitude of prescribed tasks. In the overall process, such everyday moves turn all within nature

into objectified things. Thus, human beings within this systematic process become objectified

things as well, particularly in regard to this dialectic of othering. This set of manoeuvres is,

structurally, that from which the world derives systems of identity, nationality, economics,

politics, organized religion, and ethics, etc., in an alterity of differences.

For Bataille, this objectification of the other is at the core of all moral and political

conflict in the world, especially as related to extremes of subordination, violence, war, and

genocide. Foremost in the problematic exponents of objectification is the alienation of the

individual human being from the rest of the human community. Historically, many have turned

to traditional ethical theories in attempts to address and resolve such problems. However,

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overtime there has arisen as many approaches to ethics as the numbers of problems developing in

perpetuity—approaches that only serve the maintenance of objectification and thus ultimately

fail to potentialize fully. Human beings thus remain in a state of alienation from one another in

such a way that engenders a radical alterity that leads to forms of violence. In an opposite

trajectory from that of the world of utility and project in which stands the site of traditional

ethical theories (whether found in the institutions of religion or philosophy1) lies Bataille’s body

of thought, perhaps its strongest articulation as found in his text Inner Experience.

In what follows, it is my contention that, although counterintuitive to those

aforementioned institutional sites and their concretized systems, a radically different, yet

profoundly transformative, approach to ethics is extractable from the corpus of Bataille. For

Bataille, ethics, rather than conceived as another form of project in the world of supposedly

stable and transcendental subject, is bound up in/with masochism. The word masochism here is

meant in a general sense as referring to the desire for, the love of, the pleasure or ecstasy in, pain,

punishment, anguish, humiliation, etc. Categorizing ethics then under such a header is

counterintuitive, counterproductive, and transgressive to systematical prescribed moral

boundaries, but, as will be shown, is crucial to making progress without falling victim to the

quagmires of systemization in regard to critical ethics.

Bataille’s ethics, to paraphrase his own conception of his corpus, undoes ethics for it is,

in relation to his overall work, a putting everything into question. What the systematic model of

thinking (of the world of utility) does is position subjects in a desire to “be everything,” to which

the mode of getting at Bataillean ethics explodes such manner of thinking in the realization of the

fundamental anguish of existence. As Bataille states,

1
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, (New York: State University Press, 1988), 8.

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 To ask oneself before another: by what means does he calm within himself the
desire to be everything? Sacrifice, conformity, trickery, poetry, morality,
snobbery, heroism, religion, revolt, vanity, money? or by several means together?
or all together? A wink of an eye in which glimmers betray the disguised suffering
which the astonishment at not being everything, at even having concise limits,
gives us. A suffering so difficult to thing, at even having concise limits, gives us. A
suffering so difficult to acknowledge leads to inner hypocrisy, to solemn distant
exigencies (such as the morality of Kant).2

To desire to be everything is simultaneously to carry forward the notion of a transcendental self

who engages in the tasks of the world of project with the assent to completeness. The force of

Bataille’s experience girded question above explodes any sense of completeness into a putting

everything into question.3 Clearly, Bataille here also pushes back against the epitome of

(systematic) moral figures in Immanuel Kant as well. Additionally, in opposition to systematic

ethics, Bataillean ethics gestures toward an alternative understanding of “human nature” that

posits the monstrous other as something quintessential to each individual and society, and rather

than maintaining the projection of the monstrous outward onto the other engendering an “ethics”

of offense/defense, it forces those who understand to turn ones violent and “corrective”

tendencies on oneself instead.

Deep within the text of Inner Experience, Bataille articulates a tortured meditation upon

an image of a Chinese man named Fou-Tchou-Li put to the lingchi (slow slicing) punishment, a

form of execution consisting of the victim/criminal being tied to a stake, administered opium,

and having flesh slowly sliced from the body. Such a troublesome scenario has been cause of

much debate in regard to the ethical implications of Bataille’s use or misuse, and the

implementation thereof, in the meditation upon such a gruesome image.4 For Bataille, however,

2
Ibid., xxxii.
3
Ibid.
4
Bataille’s contention is that such a practice, linked to the exercises prescribed by St. Ignatius Loyola which were
intended to make the participatory subject identity with the tortured and crucified Christ, is one that opens up to the
subject the anguish, the suffering, (and guilt) of the victim vis-à-vis a phenomenological move of identification.

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the meditation upon this image proves valuable for evoking the inner experience of what he calls

“communication.” Inner experience is paralleled to “mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of

rapture, at least of meditated emotion.”5 However as Bataille explains, the former remains

different from the latter, in that the latter remains bound to project. Inner experience too remains

in project, but in a negative rather than positive (i.e. salvific) sense—it is the type of project that

undoes project, and is of central importance to Bataille’s thought.6 For Bataille, inner experience

has all value and authority—sovereignty—and Bataille links that type of value and authority to

community.7 Communication, then, is that which lies at the core, or nucleus—the foundational

principle—of community, which is a priori to, and constitutes, all knowledge, individuals, and

morality.8

Communication is not a discursive act between two or more speaking subjects but a

communion through identification with the victim in his/her anguish—inevitably, or ultimately,

this communion is not with another being but with death. Etymologically speaking, the word

communication stems from the Latin root communicare, which literally means, “To make

common,” but also carries the signification of, “to share, divide out; communicate, impart,

inform; join, unite, participate in.”9 Throughout Bataille’s work, he connects communication

with other categorical concepts such as religious sacrifice and continuity. Thus, through close

reading of Bataille’s use of the term in relation to his meditative practices, and his concept of

continuity—the condition of existence prior to and outside of the sense of separate isolated

existence founded on the world of utility—it is clear that his meaning is closest to the

5
Ibid., 3.
6
Ibid., 22.
7
Ibid., 7.
8
Ibid., 24. Bataille’s thought on this point specifically are in reference to Martin Heidegger’s sense of community
and the relation to his concept of Dasein, a German word meaning “being-there” that he used for individuals, instead
of words gesturing to individuality per se more directly. Bataille states, “communication is a phenomenon which is
no way added on to Dasein, but constitutes it.”
9
Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php, (accessed May 3 2012).

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etymological roots rather than its contemporary diachrony. The appropriation of this specific

meaning of communication is significant for understanding the relationship to anguish, death,

and masochism in Bataille.

Before delving deeper into this particular motif, it is important to explain fully the

concept of continuity and the role this plays in relation to Bataille’s approach to death. The

concepts of continuity and its opposite discontinuity appear in the text of Erotism, in which

Bataille writes,

We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of

an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the
state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to
bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last,
there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that
is.10

Discontinuity is the state of isolated existence of all individuals—differentiated from one another

in the field of alterity, work, temporality, utility, etc. Continuity is that state of being in which all

barriers of separation have been transgressed and a phenomenological form of fusion or

unification occurs. Erotism relates continuity to that form of communion or fusion that is evoked

in the process of ritual sacrifice, which “elevates [its] victim above the humdrum world where

men live out their calculated lives.”11 Thus, sacrifice is important because it pierces the veil of

discontinuity which serves to alienate individuals, things, objects from the reality of existence

and the reality of what we are. “For us as discontinuous beings death implies the continuity of

being.”12 Death reveals to those who “experience” it vicariously through the victim this moment

or space of continuity, unity, fusion, communication. For Bataille, the ritual act of religious

sacrifice formulates a means of identification between the subject (i.e. those participating in the

10
George Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality, trans. by Mary Dalwood, (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), 15.
11
Ibid., 82.
12
Ibid.

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ritual) and the victim of the sacrifice. This identificatory move is what engenders

communication, communion with the other—but even more precisely with death. As will be

discussed below, the role of identification with a victim is crucial for Bataillean masochistic

ethics, which becomes much clearer upon reflection of Bataille’s meditation on the lingchi

photo.

Bataille posits that his meditation upon the photo of the victim of lingchi—an image

given to him by his psychoanalyst Adrien Borel—and communication in general evokes ecstasy,

the “standing outside of oneself” associated with mystical experience, and often orgasmic sexual

experience and/or eroticism, as Bataille does in Erotism. Eroticism and orgasm are not

specifically linked in Inner Experience with the ecstasy before the point that is in the case of the

meditation in question the image of the lingchi victim in the photo, it is certainly the case that

Bataille hints at the structural similarities but further fetishizes the image of the Chinese man’s

tortured body. It is specifically within the space of the Bataille’s meditation upon and

fetishization of this image that the masochistic ethical impulse emerges. Amy Hollywood is

among the scholars who posit that Bataille’s meditation on the lingchi photograph is related to

his fetishization of the image of the Chinese man’s tortured body.13 Indeed, Bataille’s

appropriation of the lingchi image as a meditational object that he refers to as “the point” through

which one can access the inner experience engendering ecstasy and communication.

Bataille writes of the “process” of the meditational practice on such an object as the

lingchi photograph (although this is not an exhaustive example), in the section of Inner

Experience called: “First Digression on Ecstasy before an Object: The Point,” saying,

“I fix a point before me and I represent this point to myself as the geometric place
of all possible existence and of all unity, of all separation and of all anguish, of all

13
Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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 unsatisfied desire and of all death. “I adhere to this point and a deep love of what
is in this point burns me to the point that I refuse to be alive for anything other
than what is there—for that point which, being together life and death of a loved
being, has the flash of a cataract. “And at the same time it is necessary to strip
what is there of its external representations until there is nothing more than pure
interiority, a pure inner fall into a void: this point endlessly absorbing this fall into
what is Nothingness within it, that is to say “past” and, in this same movement,
endlessly prostituting its fleeting but flashing appearance to love.”14

Several crucial details are circumscribed in this passage. First, there is the fundamental

demarcation of circumscription itself in marking off this fixed mediational point in ritualization

in its “geometric place.” Second, within this sacralized space, the point comes to represent the

unity of all Being—the nucleus on which the world of anguished alienation both is founded and

is dissolved. This is the space of both desire and death—the fetishization of the point that brings

the death of the subject that internalizes the transgression, the violence (the death) of the object

(the victim) through the trope of identification. What this meditative process does is “lay bare”

both the subject and the object in fusion or unification. As Bataille suggests, all external

appearances (discursive modalities) are stripped away leaving only the base reality of all beings,

which leads to the breach of the “limits of the possible,” which opens one up to the void.

Thus, the mediation on the “object” of the tortured Chinese man in the photograph is

crucial for understanding not only Bataille’s conception of ecstatic communication, but also the

move from this meditation and its effect to the masochistic ethics of (the love of) anguish,

suffering, laceration. Here is specifically how Bataille articulates his meditation on this

photography:

In any case, we can only project the object-point by drama. I had recourse to
upsetting images. In particular, I would gaze at the photographic image—or
sometimes the memory which I have of it—of a Chinese man who must have
been tortured in my lifetime. Of this torture, I had had in the past a series of
successive representations. In the end, the patient writhed, his chest flayed, arms

14
Bataille, Inner Experience, 121-122.

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 and legs cut off at the elbows and at the knees. His hair standing on end, hideous,
haggard, striped with blood, beautiful as a wasp.15

Here Bataille is appropriating the dramatization of the mystical identification with the tortured

body of Christ as written in the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola whom he claims wanted “to

disturb his disciples.”16 The mimicking of this form of spiritual exercise according to Bataille

lays everything bare, and opens up desire for all human beings.17 Bataille uses the word

“eroticism” in relation to this feeling or movement, yet fetishization is equally appropriate, and

perhaps in vocabulary that is more common carries more force. As mentioned above, there is a

definitive fetishization (eroticization) of the “object” or “point” toward which one directs one’s

identification.

The most striking and troubling moment in Bataille’s description of his dramatic

meditation lies in the aestheticization of the tortured body following from its construction as a

fetishized object of desire with the use of the modifier “beautiful,” and by extension the

poetically disrupting metaphor of this lacerated body as being “beautiful as a wasp.” A

perspective from a standpoint within a traditional ethical theory would find such aestheticization

horrifying and deplorable. However, it is precisely within this complex matrix of identification,

fetishization, and aestheticization that one begins to perceive the trajectory of a Bataillean ethics,

specifically with its masochistic mechanism. It is important to note, however, that as

counterintuitive and troubling as such an aesthetic attribution to an image of macabre violence is

to the majority of the world, Bataille too points out the awkwardness of his own description is, “I

write ‘beautiful’! . . . something escapes me, flees from me, fear robs me of myself and, as if I

15
Ibid., 119.
16
Ibid., 121.
17
Ibid., 120.

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had wanted to stare at the sun, my eyes rebel.”18 The dual nature of the subjective rupture—“the

dramatic loss of self,”19 here in an ecstasy before an object both horrifying and erotic, and in the

aesthetic gesture both beautiful and fearful—is reflective of Bataille’s general binary of thought

that can be conveniently postulated as attraction and repulsion that centers on the nucleus of the

sacred.20 Again, this notion of the sacred is fundamentally equivalent, or at least parallel, to

concepts of communication, continuity, ecstasy. Thus also, the lingchi image, like sacrifice and

eroticism, contains, or is pervaded by, both elements and is reflective of Bataille’s essential

theoretical core.

At or within this core—wherein lies the sacred—is the space of the ethical in Bataille. It

is also the space in which one sees the masochistic impulse. Despite the seemingly contradictory

complication of the coupling of these terms and categories, this complexity is a correlate of

Bataille’s thought, which is the paradoxical “project that undoes project,” or as presented by

Hollywood, “For Bataille, once again, subjective experience decenters and subverts the very

claims to objectivity on which systematic philosophy is based.”21 The radical understanding of

the “dramatic loss of self” is central to the understanding the masochistic mechanism of

Bataillean ethics. Although Bataille does not specifically make such a direct statement, the

important conceptualization of “human nature,” for lack of a less loaded phrase is one that

positions us all as beings with internal monsters. Thus, Bataille’s understanding of sacrifice in

the broader—not sufficiently religious—sense is that which both posits recognizability of the

monstrous, and the phenomenological or psychological method of effectively dealing with the

monstrous impulse of human nature that necessarily must be turned inward toward or against

18
Ibid., 119-120.
19
Ibid., 117.
20
21
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 67.

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oneself rather than being directed externally toward or against others—hence its masochism. It is

important to note that this trope is not one that assumes the possibility, or even the capability, of

correcting or casting out of the monstrous. Instead, it is best categorized as a means to redirect

one’s monstrous violence away from the creation of external conflicts—hence its ethicality.

Bataille scholar Kent Brintnall articulates this point effectively in his book Ecce Homo:

The Male-Body-In-Pain As Redemptive Figure referring to Bataille’s text Guilty stating that it

“does not directly criticize war’s devastation, or fascism’s aggression, or France’s capitulation.

Rather, it encourages internalizing the violence of ecstatic abandon in order to lacerate the self

and open it to the lacerated other.”22 Hollywood, too, aligns Bataille’s appropriation of the

photograph of the lingchi victim with his attempts to push back against Nazi atrocities in his

lifetime and to speak to the inner being of all who would hear or read his words regarding the

critically transfiguring, profoundly anti-systematic, way in which human beings could begin to

alter consciousness and behavior, especially toward others.

“Beholding the monster,” writes Jeremy Biles, “incites affective contradictions, a

rupturing experience of both life and death, joy and anguish. This paradoxical combination of

extreme affect defines what Bataille calls ‘religious sensibility.’”23 Again, this religious

sensibility is just another categorical expression for the sacred nucleus at the core of Bataille’s

thought, which maintains structural binaries of attraction and repulsion such as that garnered

from the paradoxicality that Biles gestures to above. Thus, it will not be outside of the

circumscription of Bataille’s thought to place, in addition to all aforementioned structural

22
Kent Brintnall, Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-In-Pain As Redemptive Figure, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011), 27.
23
Jeremy Biles, Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, (New York: Fordham University of
Press, 2007), 4.

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binaries, that of the masochistic ethical impulse that also arises from one of the sites of Bataille’s

manoeuvre to religious sensibility.

Of course, the particular site in question here is that of the lingchi image. To extrapolate

on the masochistic element associated with Bataille’s meditation upon this image, recall (again)

the paradoxicality of his aestheticization of this fetish object—Bataille writes that this morbid

display of gnarly human flesh is “beautiful as a wasp.” As was pointed out earlier, according to

Bataille, “Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question of that which a man

knows of being,”24 i.e., communication, which is the “being naked,” or “laying bare,” which in

turn is associated with “non-knowledge”—that which emerges in inner experience and is

opposed to the consciousness of the realm of reason, utility, instrumentalization, etc. Hence,

communication, ecstasy, the aesthetic experience of rapture in the beauty of the Chines torture

victim’s suffering is a form “non-knowledge lay[ing] bare.”25 In Bataille’s terms, “Non-

knowledge communicates ecstasy. Non-knowledge is anguish before all else. In anguish, there

appears a nudity which puts one into ecstasy.”26 Thus, non-knowledge is a “yawning gap,” the

emptying into nothingness, or the evanescent moment of the ecstatic communication between

two beings in which subject/object relations dissolve engendering the space of fusion. Again, in

Bataille’s terms, “Anguish assumes the desire to communicate but not complete resolve: anguish

is evidence of my fear of communicating, of losing myself.”27

Anguish, the desire for communication provoked by the agonizing alienation of

existence, and horror resulting from the disruptive nature of the experience of communication,

remains central to understanding the affective dimension of Bataille’s meditation upon the

24
Ibid., 4.
25
Ibid., 52.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 53.

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lingchi image. More importantly for broaching the subject of masochistic ethics, as Bataille

points out, is the role of love discovered within the demarcation of ecstatic communication.

[Of ] the young and seductive Chinese man of whom I have spoken, left to the
work of the executioner—I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct
played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature
of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take
pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin.28

Bataille’s emphasis here on his love of the experience of or engagement with the (image of the)

eroticized/fetishized—here described as “seductive,” and tortured body of Fou-Tchou-Li as not

being that of the sadistic instinct is insightful, albeit perhaps still troubling. The kernel of

troublesomeness within this passage is in the potentiality to conflate this fetishization and the

“love” to which Bataille refers with the violence of torture. However, Bataille states that the love

he felt for the torture victim was not of the sadistic type.

Although he states that the victim “communicated his pain” and that this was precisely

what he was seeking, he also specifically states that this was not “to take pleasure in it,” but “to

ruin that which is opposed to ruin.” This internal component “which is opposed to ruin” is the

self. The self, or the notion of the self, is one of our most treasured things. It is, of course, an

illusion29 being the psychological product of the order of differentiation. We are only separate

individual selves by way of the world of temporality and utility that has worked to establish,

measure, and maintain individuation and objectivity. What communication does, especially vis-

à-vis recourse to the horror of violent death, is to rend the self (or notion of self) into oblivion.

Thus, by implication the gesture made by Bataille in his reflection on the experience of

communication with the excessive pain of the lingchi victim is masochistic. That is, this love for

the victim is, not one that relishes in his suffering. Rather, given the identificatory nature of the

28
Ibid., 120.
29
Ibid., 73.

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Bataillean meditation, this love masochistic in that it gives to the meditating subject the pain and

horror of the victim. Especially in that this love is one “with-suffering”—a love in suffering, it is

a love grounded on the internalization of suffering, thus a love of suffering, not a love of the

suffering in others.

To understand this manoeuvre better, a return to the concept of non-knowledge is drawn.

Bataille’s assertion is that:

NON-KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATES ECSTATY. Non-knowledge is

ANGUISH before all else. In anguish, there appears a nudity which puts one into
ecstasy. But ecstasy itself (nudity, communication) is elusive if anguish is elusive.
Thus ecstasy only remains possible in the anguish of ecstasy, in this sense, that it
cannot be satisfaction, grasped knowledge.30

Herein lays the communication of the truth in the anguish of Fou-Tchou-Li’s torture being as

“beautiful as a wasp.” Communication is a type of knowledge that undoes knowledge, the latter

“knowledge” being epistemic in nature. Non-knowledge, however, is more or less intuitive,

although this term is lacking due to its descriptive force making the knowledge of inner

experience appear to be something of an essential quality. The aestheticization of the monstrous

torture of the lingchi victim is fundamental to Bataille’s attempt to translate the masochistic

ecstasy in the communication of suffering into language. Yet, as he points out in several places

throughout his corpus, discursive language cannot and does not access (or communicate)

communication. At best, poetic language in its capacity to sacrifice words and images31—

discursive, objective activity—is the only language left to “use” to attempt to articulate

communication.

Fou-Tchou-Li’s suffering, which becomes Bataille’s suffering, his torture, his pain, and

this ecstasy of communication, is beautiful—an aestheticization of laceration—a beautiful

30
Ibid., 52.
31
Ibid., 208.

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anguish! If in beauty is found that which is desirable and pleasing to the senses, that which is

excellent, and that which is pleasurable, enjoyable, delightful, one finds in Bataille’s

identification with the lingchi victim’s anguish, not the delight in the other’s suffering, but the

ecstasy in the cathexis of internalization of the laceration. Identification with the lacerated other

evokes the rupture of oneself through the recognition of one’s own laceration. In the section of

Inner Experience that follows Bataille’s meditation, titled, “Second Digression on Ecstasy in the

Void,” one finds a more complex explication of communication aestheticized with the word

“beautiful” (and “sublime.”)

Contemplating night, I see nothing. I remain immobile, frozen, absorbed in IT. I

can image a landscape of terror, sublime, the earth open as a volcano, the sky
filled with fire, or any other vision capable of “putting the mind into ecstasy”; as
beautiful and disturbing as it may be, night surpasses this limited ‘possible’ and
yet IT is nothing, there is nothing in IT which can be felt, not even finally
darkens. In, IT, everything fades away, but, exorbitant, I traverse an empty depth
and the empty depth traverses me. In IT, I communicate with the “unknown”
opposed to the ipse which I am; I become ipse, unknown to myself, two terms
merge in a single wrenching, barely differing from a void—not able to be
distinguished from it by anything that I can grasp—nevertheless differing from it
more than does the world of a thousand colors.32

Bataille’s explanation for this moment posits that after (or upon going deeper into) the

meditation upon the object—the lingchi image in this case—“everything slips away” into an

ecstasy of nothingness. This “night” of nothingness is sublime—both beautiful and disturbing,

and it transgresses the limits of the self, of the possible, of the knowable. The laceration of the

other (the object) becomes the laceration of the subject, and this laceration, not only tears

asunder the self of the subject, but totally consumes, annihilates, the self—the sense of separate

isolation, opening the inner being up to the ultimate woundedness and incompleteness of all

beings—of existence itself.

32
Ibid., 124.

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 The wasp like beauty, the communication of laceration, in the meditation on the lingchi

image ruins in Bataille that which is opposed to ruin, metaphorically, just as a wasp is a

predatory, parasitic, carnivorous, and aggressive creature that carries a venomous sting, but

simultaneously is a being with an aesthetically pleasing bodily configuration, both physically and

in coloration. The beautiful, and the sublime, being categories of aestheticization, then, maintain

a structural parallel to Bataille’s notion of the poetic. Thus, it is also the case that this moment in

relation to the lacerating effect of the lingchi image is a sacrificial one. The seductive beauty of

the lingchi torture victim functions in a similar way as, according to Bataille’s conception of

sacrifice, does a method of religious sacrificial ritual, and then by extension of course as the

poetic disruption of objective, discursive language.

This beauty then is a masochistic aestheticization of pain, beholding of a beatific

transfiguration in and from the anguish communicated. This beauty is parasitic on the self and

the consciousness of reason. It ruins the calculating, individuating network of rational

consciousness that differentiates between self and other, subject and object, the beautiful and

monstrous, ruination and manufacture, pain and pleasure. The ecstatic ruination of oneself in

masochism occurs with the breakdown of the distinction between (viz. fusion of) pleasure and

pain. The pleasure stems from the pain, or on the other side of the pain, though without

pedestalizing the pain itself. This is related to what Stuart Charmé suggests of masochism, at

least from the perspective of Neo-Freudian thought. Citing Erich Fromm, he posits that

“masochism represents a deliberate flight from the individual selfhood and responsibility which

represent an unbearable burden to some people. The primary aim of the masochist is [according

to Fromm] ‘to get rid of the individual self, to lose oneself; in other words, to get rid of the

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burden of freedom.’”33 In the excess of ecstasy in anguish Bataille’s loss of self in

communication overflows with love in the space of lacerating torture. He writes, “I can not help

but love [the lingchi victim], right to the dregs and without hope.”34 Without hope—but with

delight, Bataille’s explicitly stated purpose of Inner Experience is given by the following: “‘I

teach the art of turning anguish to delight’, ‘to glorify’: the entire meaning of this book.” The

implications seems to be a hope in Bataille that in Inner Experience his reader will have a mode

of being carried to this experience as well.

Whether or not such an intention fulfills itself in the minds of readers is a matter that

cannot be explored here. At best, it is safe to assume that Bataille’s meditation lead to an inner

experience, which he tries to account for in his text. The question that remains regards how this

manifestation of a masochistic impulse is the foreground of ethical ramifications. Comparing

Bataille’s experience with the meditation on the lingchi image to that of the crucifixion,

Hollywood puts forward that Bataille suggests the significance of the identificatory meditation

with the tortured suffering other is not in any salvific nature, “but [in] the suffering itself, which

serves as the projected image through which the subject experiences his or her own dissolution.

What we cannot ruin directly in ourselves, Bataille argues, we can (must?) ruin through

identification with the other’s bodily laceration.”35

As indicated above, that which is to be ruined, which itself is opposed to ruin, is the self.

But even more so, it is the self as a product of discursive, objective, regimes of knowledge, truth,

power and morality—in short, systematization. Later in the same section of Hollywood’s book

cited above, she explains that through the dissolution of self and communication a new

33
Stuart Charmé, “Religion and the Theory of Masochism,” Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 22, No. 3, (1983):
221-233.
34
Ibid., 121.
35
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 73-74.

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community arises. This “community” is one of Bataille and (in Hollywood’s example, the mystic

Angela of Foligno) the lacerated. In other words, Bataille’s emotional, visceral “meditation on

the fragmented bodies of torture victims gives rise to the dissolution of the subject and to his or

her lacerating openness to the other.”36 It is in the space of this openness to the other, particularly

to the other’s laceration, from which the discursivity of Bataillean masochistic ethics emerges.

Openness to the laceration of the other unleashes the recognition of the laceration, the

woundedness, the incompleteness, of oneself, indeed of all beings—of all existence. This

dialectic of recognition of mutual (ontological) laceration, and the openness to that reality,

generates the sense of community between subjects in pain.

Typically, the recognition of the pain of the other, in empathy and/or sympathy, falls into

the category of compassion, and there certainly is an element of compassion to this Bataillean

ethical framework. However, it would be mistaken to simply pass off the sense of Bataillean

masochistic ethics as yet another manifestation of the general category of compassion. The

notion of compassion belongs specifically to the world of the self, of project, etc. In order for one

to be compassionate for another, one has to be, and the other likewise. Certainly, Bataillean

compassion exists, yet like all things Bataillean, this too would be counterintuitive compassion.

Compassion, in a Bataillean conceptualization, can only exists on the other side of

communication, which cannot be broached in the state of communication in which the self has

been dissolved. Yet, fusion remains, and fusion is the most significant component of this ethical

matrix.

To attempt to clarify, consider the nature of ethics itself. As one of the main branches of

the discipline of philosophy, ethics asks, or at least begins with asking, one simple, yet

complicated, question, “How ought we to live?” Without question, ethics in general works from
36
Ibid., 75.

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a schematization within the realm of project that presupposes stable and fixed subjects, in some

cases even transcendental subject. Not only that, but philosophy tends to systematize concepts,

understandings, identities, relations, etc. But more specifically, especially in regard to ethics,

such systems of thought systematize conceptual frameworks regarding how one ought and ought

not to treat another—what one should and should not do to, for, and with another. The heart of

the problem in Bataillean thought is precisely in these gestures of, on the one hand constructing

notions of identity that reinforce the objectification of individuals, even those normatively

construed as subjects. For example, given the atrocities of Nazism raging around Bataille in his

lifetime, one from a traditional philosophical (ethical) perspective would criticize Bataille’s

retreat into meditation upon an image of torture rather than doing something constructively

engaged with the world in order to halt violent acts and make help implement political measures.

It is neither my position here to argue that Bataille would not posit that those are great projects,

or that he was disengaged. My contention is that Bataille’s approach to ethics is completely

removed from the essential questions that such projects are founded on.

Although never specifically articulated in such a way, Bataille’s ethics does not begin

with the question: “How ought we to live?” Rather, the approach to ethics argued for here begins

with the question: “How ought we to die?” Only selves can live, project themselves into the

world and the future, engage with other selves in systematic and objective actions, and articulate

plans and goals dealing with utility, calculation, and ethical formulations and proclamations. The

dead do nothing, formulate nothing, systematize nothing, and neither objectify, torture, nor kill.

This does not mean to suggest that we should all just go out and commit suicide. Only living

subjects can experience death—that is, the death of the self. Someone who commits suicide—

one who is biologically dead—cannot experience the loss of self in death, in ecstasy, in

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communication. In a section of Inner Experience called “Death is in a Sense an Imposture,”

Bataille states,

And still, it is true: the self-that-dies, if it has not arrived at the state of “moral
sovereignty”, in the very arms of death maintains with things a sort of harmony in
ruins. It challenges that world not doubt, but weakly; it evades its own challenge,
hides from itself what it was right to the end. Seduction, power, sovereignty are
necessary to the self-that-dies: one must be a god in order to die. Death is in one
sense the common inevitable, but in another sense profound, inaccessible. The
animal is unaware of death although it throws man back into animality. The ideal
man embodying reasons remains foreign to it: the animality of a god is essential
to its nature—at the same time dirty (malodorous) and sacred.37

The death of the self resounds in sovereignty—the space of excess, autonomy, and expenditure,

the “characteristics” that might be said to undo “character” in the sense of the latter typically

being attributed to an identificatory agent in the world corresponding to individual aggregates.

This is precisely the opposite of communication, continuity, and animality—parallel concepts of

the sacred space that is outside the realm of individuation, objectification, and systematization.

The self-that-dies “exists” in its own sovereign space, outside of the world of project. It becomes

its own authority, and explosively challenges the order of things. It is important to note, as

Bataille points out above, that only the self-that-dies that has “arrived at the state of ‘moral

sovereignty’” poses the greatest challenge to this order.

One can get the sense of the notion of sovereignty here that, with its associations of

excesses, expenditure, and a breaking down of established order, it is, in short, somewhat

frightening, dangerous even perhaps. But here again, questions in the face of such fears would

be something like, “What is it that fears? What can be threatened?” In the introduction of

Erotism, after introducing his intended use and reference to the Marquis de Sade and his

“destructive element pushed to its logical conclusion… that entails a breaking down of

37
Bataille, Inner Experience, 71.

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established patterns of regulated social order,”38 Bataille writes, “The stirrings within us have

their own fearful excesses; the excesses show which way these stirrings would take us. They are

simply a sign to remind us constantly that death, the rupture of the discontinuous individualities

to which we cleave in terror, stands there before us more real than life itself.”39 Death—is more

real than life itself! If the ultimate ethical gesture cut from Bataille is a masochistic one—one in

which the moral duty or obligation (to use the language of deontology) is to lose lacerate oneself,

to lose oneself, to open oneself up to the proximity of violence, laceration, and death and in that

space experience ecstasy, the bliss of death, then how much more moral can the gesture become

if the subject delights in the death itself.

Does this trajectory sound dangerous? The general answer, I am sure, is a resounding

“yes!” But at the core of the ethical dilemma at stake here is critical consideration of the opposite

pole of human activity to which Bataille’s thought is subversive. In the world of project, we

remain things, objectified and instrumentalized. Only in the space of communication, which

entails the ecstatic death of subjectivity, locate a sense of being beyond this instrumentalizing

modality that turns us all into objects, tools, machines, do we find nothing, and are in the space

of nothing. The ethical force of this work gets us to the place in which we recognize we are, in

some odd ontological sense, already dead. With that as our reality, what we recognize is that our

overproductive world of productivity and boundaries is a functional, yet wholly “unethical”

delusion. Bataille’s ethics is one that undoes ethics by elevating death over life (which is always-

already defined by discourse and project), privileging (the pleasure of/in) pain over the absence

or removal of pain, and by turning one’s own violent impulses, including the violence of all rule-

based authority from which traditional ethics gets its force, internally against oneself. This is not

38
Bataille, Erotism, 18.
39
Ibid., 19.

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a systematized program with “twelve” convenient steps by which to make subjects better people

who can treat others with dignity and respect and establish universal human rights. This is an

ethics of death. Can this ethics be articulated in any discursive or programmatic form? To gesture

toward any potential means of fully addressing or articulating how this sense of Bataillean

masochistic ethics would (or could) answer to the question: “How ought one to live?” requires

one to go beyond the bliss of annihilation.

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 Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, San Francisco:
City Lights, 1986.

Bataille, Georges. Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall, New York: SUNY Press, 2011.

Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, New York: SUNY Press, 1988.

Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1992.

Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. by
Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Biles, Jeremy. Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form. New York: Fordham
University of Press, 2007.

Brintnall, Kent. Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-In-Pain As Redemptive Figure. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Charmé, Stuart. “Religion and the Theory of Masochism,” Journal of Religion and Health,
Vol. 22, No. 3, (1983): 221-233.

Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

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