Georges Bataille: Literature, Evil, and Philosophy of Gift

Bataille's Excessive Literature as a Radical Shocking Tool

Ideas in literature, which is one of the ways philosophers write for the general reader. Instead, he wanted to shock his readers into seeing society as he saw it, and this was his radical way of doing it. He was fascinated by the potential power of the obscene. For example, one of his texts was entitled, “The Solar Anus.”

Bataille described excess that accelerates. His characters became obsessed, consumed with giving, and trapped in an endless, unproductive cycle of exchange, whether the exchange is a glorious one or is catastrophic. For example, in “The Story of the Eye,” there is obsessive sexuality involving violent and repeated rape, necrophilia, coprophilia, fetish objects such as eyeballs, and numerous other types of deviance.

Are you curious about what kind of man would write of such things and become famous for it in the process as a philosopher and social commentator? We invited you to view the only TV interview of Georges Bataille ever made on YouTube, entitled “Georges Bataille: Literature and Evil.” You may well be surprised to listen to a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man who appears to be the epitome of the French intellectual. Note, in particular, the reason he gives toward the end of the interview—we must face evil, confront it, in order to overcome it. We must not be afraid to explore the activities we have been taught belong to the dark side of human nature.

Well, perhaps, but how does Bataille’s penchant for obscenity and pornography relate to the philosophy of the gift, you may well be asking at this point. The key word is excess. Everything Bataille wrote is of an excessive nature, regardless of the subject matter. And what is excess, if not a perverted form of generosity? And finally, what is the impetus of the gift? A gift springs from some form of generosity.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the important German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and philologist we covered in Chapter 8, reflected on the necessity of gift-giving. His character, Zarathustra, understood only too well that when you give, the gift can be regarded as a pharmakon (poison) because the receiver feels obligated to return the gift, yet cannot because they have nothing to give of equal value. Giving gifts is actually an art, said Zarathustra, because the trick is not to cause the receiver a feeling of indebtedness. Zarathustra complicated his remarks by pointing out that he never felt impoverished by his generosity and continued to regard gift-giving as the highest virtue. A good student, he pointed out, returns the gift by surpassing the teacher, but since the teacher never knows this, the gift doesn’t return to the teacher, so it is not a counter-gift.

Martin Heidegger [HY-dig-ger] (1889–1976), the famous German philosopher we discussed in Chapter 8, took a different approach to the concept of the gift. His reflections on “the gift of Being” described the gift as not within a cycle of exchange, but in terms of time. Heidegger reconfigured the gift as “the forgetting of the gift-event of Being.” He used the word “event” to indicate that the gift is a happening in time. According to Heidegger, a gift is impossible in time. A gift occurs only outside time.

Think of time as an unbroken directional thrust that is always moving forward. Now think of us existing as part of this movement. If the only true gift is outside of time as Heidegger insisted, then the only way a gift could exist is if that time directional is somehow interrupted or broken for a fraction of a second. Only during that break in the movement of time, which is still connected to time but is not actually a part of time, could a gift exist. Still not clear? Think of a baseball thrown up into the air. Its trajectory is in one direction: up. But at a certain point, gravity stops its trajectory, and the direction reverses. The ball falls until it hits the ground or is caught by someone. In that fraction of a second it took for the direction of the ball to reverse, you could imagine that time stopped. And in that brief nano-second, there could be the gift.