Jean Baudrillard and Georges Bataille on eroticism
By Dr. Lucien Oulahbib

In Exchange symbolicus and the Death^[1] , for example, the chapter entitled “La mort chez Bataille”, Baudrillard asks (pp. 236-242) about the “exchange” between “(la) vie et la mort”, and compares his understanding with Bataille’s conception of the “luxurious conjunction of sex and death” (Ibid., p. 238).

Baudrillard begins by noting that he prefers Bataille’s acception to that of “the psychoanalytic vision”, which is rather a “vision by default” (Ibid., p. 236). Freud makes “death and sexuality” “antagonistic principles” (Ibid., p. 237). Baudrillard explains what links him to Bataille (Ibid., pp. 236-237):

“Instead of instituting death as a regulation of tensions and a balancing function, as an economy of drive, Bataille introduces it instead as a paroxysm of exchange, overabundance and excess.” Further on (Ibid., p. 237):

“There is no specific economy for either of them: it is only when they are separated that life and death fall under the scope of an economy -confused, they pass together beyond the economy, in celebration and loss (eroticism for Bataille): “There is no difference between death and sexuality. They are but the acute moments of a feast that nature celebrates with the inexhaustible multitude of beings, both having the sense of unlimited waste that nature proceeds against the desire to last that is the hallmark of every being”(…)”.

And again (Ibid., p. 238):

“Bataille’s vision of death as an excessive principle, and as an anti-economy. Hence the metaphor of luxury, of the luxurious nature of death. Only sumptuary and useless expenditure has meaning – the economy, for its part, has no meaning, it’s only residue, which we’ve made the law of life, whereas wealth lies in the luxurious exchange of death: sacrifice, the “cursed part”, that which escapes investment and equivalence, and which can only be annihilated. If life is simply a need to last at all costs, then annihilation is a priceless luxury. In a system where life is governed by value and utility, death becomes an unnecessary luxury, and the only alternative.

In fact, Baudrillard, like Freud reading Schopenhauer^[2] , adopts an anthropomorphic interpretation of death, and fails to see that Bataille uses death to legitimize his understanding of loss.

So when Baudrillard states (Ibid., pp. 238-239):

“What Freud missed was not seeing death as the very curvature of life, but the vertigo, the excess, the reversal of the whole economy of life that it brings about – it was making it, in the form of a final drive, a time-delayed equation of life. It is to have formulated its final economy under the sign of repetition, and to have missed its paroxysm. Death is neither resolution nor involution; it is reversion and symbolic challenge (…)”.

Baudrillard concedes that Freud sees death as the goal of life, its “curvature”, but this is to project an unfounded teleological meaning that confuses end and means: for nothing can say that the goal of life would be death, especially under the sole pretext that life uses death as a means to continue, which is not the same thing, or that death comes at the end of a life, which does not mean, at least so far, the end of life.

Moreover, by correlating death and luxury, death being seen exclusively from the angle of excess, excessive expenditure etc., Baudrillard seems to deploy, like Bataille (although he differs from him), a perception that is certainly not naturalistic, but remains quantitativist.

If only because this degree zero of luxury is conceived solely as the shedding of surplus in order to let its barbaric opposite come and go: the limitless force of life, whose affirmation is perceived not as deployment as such, but as death at every turn. Whereas life does not aim for death as an end.

The same goes for luxury. In Bataille and Baudrillard, luxury no longer aims at the refinement of life, its chiseling, which is nonetheless the very being of luxury. Or else words no longer have any meaning other than that of their material, vulgar filigree. Yet luxury for them is only luxuriance and lust: artifice denying itself.

So where does Baudrillard see Bataille’s non-economist “luxury”?

In the texts of Bleu du Ciel and Histoire de l’œil, which mix dirt, ugliness and sexuality in order to reduce the latter to the former, thus reiterating the secular meaning of religious dogma, which points the finger at eroticism as the economy par excellence of evil and its violence?

For example,^[3] :

  “(…) The driver was overturned with a gasp. I turned on the car’s interior light. Edwarda, upright, straddled the worker, her head back, her hair hanging down. Supporting the back of her neck, I saw her white eyes. She tensed on the hand that carried her, and the tension increased her moan. Her eyes recovered, and for a moment she seemed to calm down. She saw me: from her gaze, at that moment, I knew it was returning from the impossible, and I saw, deep inside her, a vertiginous fixity. At the root, the flood that inundated her spilled over into her tears: the tears streamed from her eyes. Love, in those eyes, was dead, a cold dawn emanated from them, a transparency where I read death. And everything was tied up in this dreamy gaze: the naked bodies, the fingers that opened the flesh, my anguish and the memory of drooling lips, there was nothing that didn’t contribute to this blind slide into death. (…)

(…). (To continue? I wanted to but I don’t care. The point is not there. I say what oppresses me at the moment of writing: is everything absurd? or does it make sense? I make myself sick thinking about it. I wake up in the morning – and so do millions of girls and boys, babies and old people, sleep forever dispelled… Do I and these millions have a meaning in our awakening? A hidden meaning? Obviously hidden! But if nothing makes sense, there’s nothing I can do: I’ll go backwards, using trickery. I’ll have to let go and sell myself to nonsense: for me, it’s the executioner who tortures and kills me, not a shadow of hope. But what if there is meaning? I don’t know today. What about tomorrow? What do I know? I can’t conceive of any meaning that isn’t “my” torment, as far as that goes. And for now: nonsense! Mr. Nonsense writes, he understands he’s crazy: it’s awful. But his madness, this nonsense – as he has suddenly become “serious”: – could this be precisely “meaning”? (No, Hegel has nothing to do with the “apotheosis” of a madwoman…). My life only has meaning if I lack it; if I’m crazy: understand who can, understand who dies…; so the being is there, not knowing why, cold and trembling…; immensity and night surround it and, quite deliberately, it’s there to… “not to know. ( …) “.

Here are just a few strategic variables:

“Mr. No-Sense writes, he understands he’s crazy: it’s awful. But his madness, this nonsense – as he has suddenly become “serious”: – could this be precisely “meaning”? (…) My life has no meaning unless I lack it.

Let us now observe how Baudrillard hooks his referential to Bataille, whom he quotes (L’échange…op.cit., p. 238):

” (…) ” What does the eroticism of bodies mean if not a violence of the being of the partners? … The whole erotic enactment has as its principle a destruction of the structure of the closed being that is, in its normal state, a partner in the game” (…)”.

Baudrillard comments on this quotation from Bataille (Ibid., p. 238):

“Erotic nudity is equal to killing, insofar as it inaugurates a state of communication, loss of identity and fusion.”

Let’s look first at Bataille’s text

In what way is the “eroticism of bodies” a “violation of the partners’ being” if not by positing that the amorous game, when it simulates, simultaneously and alternately, conflict, tension, fusion, harmony, the demand for objectification, acquiescence to the other’s desire, is, as such, a “killing”?…

Rather, it’s a test to see how other people apply their answers, which allows us to rave about them or distance ourselves from them.

In Bataille’s case, by establishing an equivalence between eroticism and killing, a kind of absolute solipsism is projected, which prohibits any corresponding modification on pain of feeling a loss of sovereignty, and therefore killing. The latter is established when there is no reciprocity, and not when symbolic exchange circulates, putting death to one side and prolonging moments of life, especially the most harmonious ones, even when biological death comes.

Bataille, on the other hand, by arbitrarily associating eroticism and death, deploys a rejection, a condemnation, an a priori damnation of life, and above all of human love, which cannot indeed be triggered if it is not woven by this staking, in the literal sense, of the capacity to be, really, and fully, there: absolute reciprocal love of Interaction.

This demand for bliss, fulfillment, harmony in phase, or Nirvana, cannot be reduced to a death sentence.

That is to say, in the Hegelian language manipulated by Bataille, to the sole analytical observation with a view to instrumentalization as a tool of enjoyment, whereas it is above all a question of observing in others their capacity to be fully of the world, with eroticism deployed as the chosen interpretation.

Otherwise, it would simply be impossible for the two parties to be on the same level, in the same gaze, on the same footing, which stops the reversibility of symbolic exchange and restricts the relationship to its strictly economic and political dimension, in which the strength of the relationship is perceived solely as a relationship of force.

Nor should we confuse all the artifice, indeed, of the game of seduction, with that of a killing in the sense of “a loss of identity and fusion”. Unless, of course, it’s a simulated, reversible loss, which only brings into play the lasting possibility of the unity thus sublimated.

Otherwise, if we were to see the desire for “fusion” only as “loss”, we wouldn’t understand this type of love game, which seeks, on the contrary, to find in the extra fusion a greater freedom in the extra strength that makes the relationship even more meaningful. By freeing up extra strength, such fusion can in fact encourage even greater action in social-political interaction, which in turn will nourish and refine the fusion of love, since the fullness achieved socially will have an even greater impact on the fusion process, if it is one of its sources.

On the other hand, to identify fusion and loss would be to display a lack of understanding of inter-human relations, except in a racialist vision that forbids any interaction, alliance or lasting relationship with a non-ethnos member….

This would be even more tantamount to detecting in every obedience, every agreement, every acceptance, every recognition, in the slightest rustle of human life that is both autonomous and overflowing with fusion, a “loss”, posited then as the expression of a false freedom, that of the modern devil, that is, of the political economy that would restrict others to being merely objects….

Yet it is precisely by reducing erotic play, and more generally charming, seductive, fusional play, to a single killing that it becomes nothing more than an immanent quantity of usable force, rather than an exchange that privileges sharing and exploration.

This implies that when the game, through such insistence on going beyond the limits of reciprocity, sinks as a compulsive sign of overcompensation, the mirror object of a simulation caught up in its own game, the total, definitive separation and splitting of an individuality reduced to its mere silence, then, yes, this simulation rises to the rank of scapegoat and can be that of a real killing, of expiation.

But it is precisely in this last aspect that Bataille reifies eroticism and uses it as a means to destruction: his ultimate goal.

For him, it’s a matter of exacerbating a seeing without looking: dead. Refusing to become. Seeing only its first decomposing movement and never its recomposition. And this not out of skeptical gesture, metaphysics of nothingness absorbing all human excess, but the political will to establish an equivalence between life and death in order to prevent the latter through the former.

For Bataille, the only thing that prevails is the reduction of life to a substrate that has to boil in order not to economize and tip over into the all-too-human, that filth, or corruption. This explains our refusal to conceive of life as anything other than overflowing and luxuriant. On the one hand, this is tantamount to perceiving it only in its naturalness, its virginity, that of the golden age, beneath the human.

On the other hand, it’s inconceivable that the human being, in his or her own life, is in fact an autonomous social being, rather than an informal entity in a state of permanent potentiality.

*

Now let’s take a look at Baudrillard’s thinking

What does he find in this Bataillian “loss”? Undoubtedly, and in view of his writings, because he’s looking for a referential link with a beyond of the overly restrictive political economy, and would like to find a truly Nietzschean continuator, a beyond of value.

How does he proceed? Perhaps by imagining here a rectified Bataille, a rescued Bataille (as in the past we tried to save the “real” Marx, Lenin…), a “real” Bataille, finally, without the “error” (L’échange… op.cit., p. 240-242) that Baudrillard thinks he detects in him, and which mixes too much “biological” and “symbolic” death.

Baudrillard cites Bataille, for example (Ibid., p. 240):

“The desire to produce at low cost is properly human. Nature, on the other hand, lavishes lavishly, ‘sacrifices’ cheerfully.”

Comment by Baudrillard (Ibid., pp. 240-241):

“Why seek the backing of an ideally prodigal nature, against that of the economists, ideally calculating? Luxury is no more “natural” than economics. Sacrifice and sacrificial spending are not in the order of things. This error even leads Bataille to conflate reproductive sexuality and erotic expenditure: “The excess from which reproduction proceeds and the excess that is death can only be understood one with the help of the other.” Reproduction as such is without excess – even if it implies the death of the individual, it is still a positive economy and a functional death – for the benefit of the species. Sacrificial death, on the other hand, is anti-productive and anti-reproductive. It does aim for continuity, as Bataille puts it, but not the continuity of the species, which is merely the continuity of an order of life, whereas radical continuity, where the subject abysses in sex and death, always signifies the fabulous loss of an order. (…).

(…) Against a nature that would be a debauchery of living energies and an orgy of annihilation, “being” protects itself with prohibitions, resisting by every means possible this impulse to excess and death that comes from nature (yet its resistance is never more than provisional: “men never opposed violence and death with a definitive no”).  Bataille thus sets up, on the basis of a natural definition of expenditure (nature as a model of prodigality) and an equally substantial and ontological definition of economy (it’s the subject who wants to maintain his being – but where does this fundamental desire come from?), a kind of subjective dialectic of prohibition and transgression, where the initial elation of sacrifice and death is lost in the delights of Christianity and perversion – a kind of objective dialectic between continuity and discontinuity, where death’s challenge to economic organization gives way to a great metaphysical alternation”.

However, Bataille is not concerned with “naturalist temptation” (Ibid., p. 241), or even “transgression”, with a “fundamentally Christian mystique” (Ibid., p. 242). But of the tactical necessity of using both this naturalism and this transgression – legitimized by a quantitativist economist anthropomorphism in the manner of “dialectical materialism”, in short, à la Lenin – to achieve a strategic goal, that of destruction, an extermination in itself, in order to undermine at the base any will to erect, in every sense of the word, that might create capital, which must then be spent (de/spent) from the outset, before it can be transformed into a social order, a “bourgeois” order^[4] …

This implies extirpating the power of living, its “élan vital” as Bergson would say, from within culture itself, from reason, and thus from meaning, including the symbolic, in order to allow only the “exuberance of forces” to come to an end^[5] , says Bataille, that of the “morality of the summit” (Œuvres complètes… Ibid.), so dear to Nietzsche, but itself instrumentalized as the death of the absolute rulers of Bolshevism (defended tooth and nail by Bataille in La Part maudite and Maurice Blanchot in Amitiés…)^[6] these new providential barbarians, who perceive the extent of their power only in the destruction of others (Eurydice), the exact opposite of the creator god, this unity, this centrality of which man is an imitation and which must be broken.

 For Bataille, it’s not just a matter of talking or talking about it – just as it’s not enough to paint Caesar’s murder, but to “be” Brutus (Blanchot), for that would be to act (only) in the “morality of decline” .^[7]

It’s a question of being Brutus and putting to death, really, in the Leninist way, with Nietzschean effervescence (especially that of Turin) what is basically closer to the brute, also so dear to Jean Genet (admired by Jean-Paul Sartre) than to the aesthete.

Under these conditions, the only thing “luxurious” about the killing would be the scale of the disaster: tens of millions of deaths due to the “marvellous mental chaos”^[8] Bolshevik.

But this destruction is only intended as a means to the superior strategic vision of the Nietzschean gods of the “strong race”. And Lenin’s professional revolutionaries personified them so well that the Nazis made them their model….

On the other hand, it would be even more interesting to develop Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the death of eroticism in general (including that of politics and art) in pornography (which he has done many times^[9] ), or the obscene, off-stage killing of love, life and relationships, whose object is reduced to nothing more than a jet (a flash)...

---

^[1] Paris, Gallimard, 1976.
^[2] Au-delà du principe du plaisir, Essais de psychanalyse, Payot, 1981, p. 97.
^[3] Bataille, Madame Edwarda, Histoire de l’œil, Paris, 10/18, 1956, pp. 50-53.
^[4] For a detailed analysis, see my book Ethique et épistémologie du nihilisme, les meurtriers du sens, 2002: https://www.librairie-gallimard.com/livre/9782747529907-ethique-et-epistemologie-du-nihilisme-les-meurtriers-du-sens-lucien-samir-oulahbib/  
^[5] Bataille, op. cit. in Complete Works, VI, p. 42.
^[6] For a detailed analysis of the latter, see also my book cited in note 5.
^[7] Bataille, Ibid. p. 345.
^[8] La part maudite, op. cit. p. 185.
^[9] https://www.revue-etudes.com/article/comment-baudrillard-dut-se-taire-sur-l-art-contemporain/23227 and http://pointopoint.blogg.org/la-pornographie-visitation-a-baudrillard-a116324910