Heterology or ‘The Science of the Excluded Part’: An Introduction

Beyond Surrealism: Sade, the Heterogeneous Body

It was in ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ (Bataille, 1985a), ¹ a text with a strong sense of ‘politisch verstehende Stellungnahme’ (Bishof, 2015: 80), that Bataille used the term heterology for the first time. Marcus Coelen describes it as ‘a neologism in French’ (2016: 89), characterised by semantic instability given both the synonyms hagiology (science of the sacred) and scatology (science of excrement) with which the author associates the term, and the ‘science of what is completely other’ (Bataille, 1985a: 102) that this term is tasked with defining. Contrary to other sciences that seek to structure a homogeneous world, heterology, based on the notion of a foreign or heterogeneous body, ‘is opposed to any homogeneous representation of the world, in other words, to any philosophical system’ (Bataille, 1985a: 97). Instead of orienting and building, it disorients: it discovers the flaws inherent in every system, mobilises the unsaid residing in every argument and the formlessness underlying every form, the nonsense that threatens sense. Strictly speaking, heterology is not even a science. Its position is not that of scientific objectivity: what characterises it is a sort of magnetic field, an obscure, spectral area crossed by ‘a double current of attraction and repulsion’ (Bataille, 2018a). A paradoxical science, that began its exploratory journey in the research of Lévy-Bruhl and Cassirer on the mythical thought of primitive man and in Freud’s work on the logic of dreams, heterology is free from ‘degrading chains of logic’ and uses science ‘like a beast of burden’, enslaving it, with the help of its own weapons, ‘to accomplish ends which are not those of science itself’ (Bataille, 1985b: 80). ² In fact, rather than discarding acquired knowledge, it entails using science to take it beyond the realms of what is known, thereby revealing the ‘excluded part’ (Bataille, 2018a), something Bataille started making references to in January 1927 during psychoanalytical therapy with Adrien Borel, describing the project of a mythical anthropology based on the pineal eye. ‘Doomed to the contemplation of the sun at the apogee of its brilliance’ (Bataille, 1985c: 74), ³ this embryonic organ connected to the pineal gland opens on the top of the head; in contrast to the horizontal direction of ocular vision functional to preservation, it is a phantasmal vertical vision consistent with the dual human aspiration for vertiginous ascent towards the sky and abject falling downwards.

Science, in its desire to construct itself as such, has discarded ‘the delirious parts of the old religious constructions’ (Bataille, 1985b: 82) intended for the enslavement of man with the aim of destroying them. Heterology, coming into play at the end of the exclusion process performed by science, reverses this destructive act to reacquire the images of the myth, shedding its ‘heavy mantel of mystical servitude’ (Bataille, 1985b: 82). As a sort of return of the repressed, heterology checkmates the utilitarian logic of scientific anthropology, plunging the abstract representations formulated by methodical knowledge in the ‘puerile play’ of the myth (Bataille, 1985b: 84). The dual aspiration of man symbolised in the image of the pineal eye thus returns to join the path of Icarus’s mythical ascent towards the sun and his disastrous fall, and furthermore, to join Prometheus’s conquest of the sun’s fire and his horrendous punishment, interpreted by psychoanalysis as the staging of the castration complex: this allows those it has atrophied to experience a basic human adventure by projecting them towards the sun. Though it entails the experience of castration, heterology also upsets the phallic logic of Oedipal castration ‘by suspending its symbolic process’ (Arnould-Bloomfield, 2009: 81) and producing ‘the sacrifice of the phallus in castration’ (Sollers 1971: 99). ‘A hole in the real’, the pineal eye ‘inscribes “man” outside of the logic of identification’ (Hollier, 1989: 128–9).

Contrary to the closed sphere of the homogeneous, the heterogeneous erupts where reason stops, turning the regressive mechanisms of fear and disgust into an instrument of genuine ecstatic rupture, to assume the ‘shameful’ scraps of thought following the inspiration of the most abject and transgressive practices of Sade’s universe. This operation passes explicitly through the declaration not only of the almost total censure that ‘civilised’ society directed at Sade, but of the very use-value that his work was granted by the Surrealists, ‘exalting his spirit of revolt and toning down the most heterogeneous aspects of his thinking. Their reception of Sade exhibits the two elementary functions of any psychophysical or social organisation: appropriation and excretion. In order to break with this “use-value”, heterology reveals a more complex process of “excretion” in Sade’s world’ (Galletti, 2016: 32). Bataille calls a ‘process of composite excretion’ (Bataille, 1985a: 95) one where ‘that which is expelled acquires value precisely because it has been excreted, and can maintain its negative energy intact’ (Pasi, 1987: 94). In other words, unlike the Surrealist notion of the function of excretion, which amounts to a ‘common use value of excrement; in other words, for the most part, one most often only loves the rapid (and violent) pleasure of voiding this matter and no longer seeing it’ (Bataille, 1985a: 92), the ‘process of composite excretion’ aims to invest the heterogeneous body with sacred value. And it is expulsion that determines ‘the positive value that makes it possible to release violent affective reactions’ (Bataille, 1970a: 163). ⁴

Hence the radical gesture at the foundation of heterology, for Bataille, starts with Durkheim’s classification of social matters into sacred and profane, and the separation of higher and lower degrees of sacredness: this gesture threatens the progressive identification, on the one hand, of the sacred with the high sacred, and on the other, of the low sacred with the profane, in favour of a more complex scheme in which the sacred rediscovers the meaning of the Latin term sacer, which is high and low, pure and impure, and even right and left.

Essentially, it means taking into consideration the modification that revealed religions imprinted on the sacred when they removed it from the primitive violence that was at its foundation in order to make the divine world converge with reason. In deeper ways, it means rediscovering, behind the process of censorship implemented by institutionalised religions, the principle of the prodigality of living matter that, in the practical development of heterology, becomes associated with revolution: the latter, removed from its utilitarian function, in accordance with nature’s grand design for extermination as described by Sade, allows for the sacrificial character that underlies it to come to the surface. Equally important is the post-revolutionary moment, when the affirmation of a ‘heterological conception of human life’ allows for the generalisation of ‘orgiastic participation in different forms of destruction’ (Bataille, 1985a: 102). In the closing sections of ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’, Bataille comes to imagine a new community, ‘antireligious and asocial’ (Bataille, 1985a: 101), whose goal is to realise this orgiastic participation on the premise of a collusion of Sade’s transgressive morality with the practices of black communities, once liberated from all superstition as from all oppression they experience in America.

The text of 1968 entitled ‘The Old Mole and the Prefix Sur in the Words Superman and Surrealist’ (1985d) ⁵ continues and expands on the virulent attack on the idealism that permeates the Surrealists’ admiration for Sade. Here Bataille calls upon the ‘Icarus complex’ as that which spoils, through a re-elevation of the lowly, the Surrealist revolt against bourgeois values, ‘an extreme provocation [that] seeks to draw immediate and brutal punishment’ (Bataille, 1985d: 39). This is evidenced in the ‘Second Manifesto on Surrealism’, which states: ‘the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd’ (Breton, cited in Bataille, 1985d: 39). The heterological revolution operates at a distance from the puerile ‘escape’ of this Icarian ‘deviation’; if the latter represents ‘a kind of dawn of mental liberation’ (Bataille, 1985d: 43) that corresponds to the political counterattack of Bonapartism, the heterological revolution instead operates where the ‘irruption of excremental forces’ invoked by Sade joins the erosive power of the revolution of Marx’s old mole that digs holes in the insalubrious and putrid depths of the underground (Bataille, 1985a: 92).

Heterology and the Political

After Hitler’s rise to power, heterology operates as the starting point of a ‘low’ materialism, an instrument for fighting against the totalitarianism that threatened to devastate Europe. The essay of 1933 entitled ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ (1985e), ⁶ a first attempt at rigorously analysing ‘the social superstructure and its relations to the economic infrastructure’, responded to that context (Bataille, 1985e: 137). By drawing on French sociological data, Hegelian phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, it aimed to create a new social science: ‘sacred sociology’. In fact, a note in the margins of the text suggests that sacred sociology was assimilated to heterology. Modelled on Durkheim’s sacred, it devised a split into the categories of heterogeneous/homogeneous and high heterogeneous/low heterogeneous. However, sacred sociology can be distinguished from heterology when a third element is added to the homogeneous-heterogeneous dyad, one that deeply changes its nature: the state. The state is distinct from both the homogeneous and the heterogeneous and is as functional to one as to the other, partly changing both. As a formation that ensures the stability of the homogeneous by tying it to higher forms of heterogeneity, the state is in fact also the instrument used by higher forms of heterogeneity to exercise sovereignty: ‘The State […] is distinct from kings, heads of the army, or of nations, but it is the result of the modifications undergone by a part of homogeneous society as it comes into contact with such elements’ (Bataille, 1985e: 139).

In this context, even the terms homogeneous and heterogeneous introduced by heterology are readjusted. The homogeneous becomes a parameter that in the industrial era defines the bourgeois owners of the means of production: namely, useful society. The paradigm of the homogeneous is therefore the money that denies man ‘existence for itself ’ (Bataille, 1985e: 144), enslaving him to the principle of utility. On the contrary, the heterogeneous is irreducible to the parameters of reason and in this it is like the unconscious, so much so that Bataille takes the latter as a form of the heterogeneous itself.

Bataille identifies a process of approximations as the only feasible way of demarcating heterogeneity. The first criterion used for this demarcation is again the notion of the sacred: this, with its dual aspects of mana (the mysterious force that primitive peoples thought some individuals, such as kings and sorcerers, possessed) and taboo (the set of ritual prohibitions applied to people, places, objects and circumstances), is consistent with an aspect of heterogeneity. Because of this, ‘the heterogeneous thing is assumed to be charged with an unknown and dangerous force (recalling the Polynesian mana) and a certain social prohibition of contact (taboo) separates it from the homogeneous or ordinary world (which corresponds to the profane world in the strictly religious opposition)’ (Bataille, 1985e: 142).

A second demarcation criterion is applied by going beyond the realm of the sacred, and of religion and magic, to explore the notion of unproductive expenditure (dépense), a notion discussed generically in ‘The Pineal Eye’ (1985b) and ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ (1985a) that unfolded in the 1930s as a way of calling capitalist economics into question. This notion is implicated in archaic societies in the potlach, a form of exchange analysed by Marcel Mauss (1954) in his celebrated essay on The Gift, and in the modern world it takes on the most grandiose social form in the workers’ revolution. The heterogeneous world thus comes to coincide with the manifestations of expenditure, which also includes the sacred, and becomes redefined as what ‘consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent value’ (Bataille, 1985e: 142). At this point, an initial, detailed inventory of the heterogeneous is possible:

Included are the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the various unconscious processes such as dreams or neuroses; the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc.). (Bataille, 1985e: 142)

Beyond Marxism: From the Revolution of the Low Heterogeneous to ‘The Popular Front in the Street’ and the ‘Headless Community’ of Acéphale

Jules Monnerot, who before moving over to the extreme right worked with Bataille on the magazine Acéphale and earlier at the Collège de Sociologie, was peremptory in recognising that ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ was the only essay written in France in the 1930s that did not underestimate the significance of the phenomenon of fascism. Heterology was described in this essay and in the one that complements it, ‘Vers la révolution réelle’ [Towards the real revolution], published in the first of Les cahiers de ‘Contre-Attaque’, as the radically new lens through which, in the years preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, Bataille entered the mazes of the mechanism of power formation and its unprecedented developments in the political context of his times. Starting with the opposition between homogeneous society (or the bourgeoisie) and the heterogeneous, divided into a higher form of heterogeneity (or imperative sovereignty) and a lower one (that is, the proletariat), guided by the compass of the workers’ revolution, Bataille introduced an initial differentiation between the autocracy and the democracy of republican regimes and constitutional monarchies. On the one side, he showed how in an autocracy, homogeneity is strictly tied to the higher form of heterogeneity, which in turn is represented by the absolute monarch whose sovereignty is realised as radical exclusion of the lower form of heterogeneity, which is, in turn, oppressed and doomed to abjection if not to the most absolute form of inadmissibility. This latter is the case of the lumpenproletariat – ‘which, unlike an organized proletariat […] – would be a heterogeneity that, turned loose, would bring on the disintegration of all the structures guaranteeing the homogeneity of the social edifice’ (Hollier, 1989: 125–6), a mass that, as the holder of ‘something lower than the bottom’, ‘can no longer even think of itself as a class’ (Bois and Krauss, 2000: 236).

Under these conditions, which block the structure of the higher form of heterogeneity, only the proletariat can become agitated and subversive (Bataille sees the Russian Revolution in this context). On the other side, democratic crises are produced where the heterogeneous imperative (the king in constitutional monarchies; the nation in republics) is atrophied. What becomes intolerable in these situations is no longer authority, but the lack of authority. Subversion, as well as being a lower form of heterogeneity, can then, thanks to a militarised structure (as in the case of the fascist party), head towards the orbit of imperative sovereignty. This leads us to what in 1924 Antonio Gramsci defined as a historic situation without precedent, from which he developed the notion of the ‘united front from below’: the mass organisation of the bourgeoisie proletarianised by the decline of capitalism. Therefore, contrary to Lenin’s predictions, two opposite revolutions, like heterogeneous or ‘foreign bodies’ (Bataille, 1985f: 92), ⁸ came into conflict with the individualistic decomposition of homogeneous society and, since the workers’ movement continued to act as a destabilising factor – as the possibility of revolution was gradually asserted – the probability of a proletariat affirmation was undermined by the higher form of heterogeneity.

A second differentiation allowed Bataille to show what distinguishes fascism as the illusion of ‘an intense community, devoted to excess’ (Nancy, 1991: 17) not only from democracy, but from autocracy itself, and what makes it a ‘total heterogeneous power’ (Bataille, 1985e: 153): that is, the simultaneously religious and military mould that has formed it since its establishment. Fascism occurs when homogeneity breaks down: in fact, it is precisely a response to social decomposition. The conditions for its affirmation to the detriment of the proletariat revolution can be traced back to the profound change that took place in the political sphere with the transition from autocracy to democracy; this in turn signalled the transition to an accomplished type of monarchical sovereignty that relies on both the homogeneous and the higher form of heterogeneity to constitute itself as political theology (Esposito, 2015).

This concentration of power, which Bataille relates to a latent inferiority complex that is not foreign to either Germany or Italy, is implemented – consistent with the model Freud outlined in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego – on a military affective model, but is primarily based on the religious value of the leader whose role, as the incarnation of a deified nation, is comparable to that of ‘Allah, incarnated in the person of Mahomet or the Khalif’ in Islam (Bataille, 1985e: 154). But, contrary to Islam and autocracy, fascism also gives rise to the reunification of the sovereign nation (identified by the fascist party itself) with the state. Like the notion of race in Nazism, the state becomes the principle of every value. This reinforcement of the state also allows what can be called a sort of generalised mimicry of 20th-century social forms to emerge: beside the deep complicity that ties the two opposing revolutionary movements produced by democratic crises, Bataille identified, even in the basic opposition of Bolshevism to fascism, the progressive convergence of two political regimes towards an identical ‘accomplished uniting of imperative forces’ (Bataille, 1985e: 154): a contraction, in the context of Russian communism, of the primitive revolutionary impulse and evolution of the Bolshevik party towards a military structure; an imitation, on the part of fascism, of the Russian authoritarian state developed through the deification of Lenin and Stalin – phenomena echoed by the promotion of the national sentiment within the French communist party too. This distinctive form of homology, understood in the wake of Durkheim as the effect of an organic unconscious force in society, explains the distressing prospect that opens the extract ‘Le fascisme en France’ [Fascism in France]: that of a world that is perhaps about to reaffirm the principle of its unity in a fascist type of society ‘where, perhaps, man thinks only and lives only through the Duce’ (Bataille, 1970b: 210). ⁹ Hence the urgency to give the struggle against fascism the broadest and most generic meaning of ‘a general action against the State’ (Bataille, 1970c: 175).

Midway between ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ and ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, the text ‘Definition of Heterology’ (Bataille, 1970c: 168), an excerpt of an essay on heterology that never progressed beyond a draft, published here for the first time in English, lends itself to be read as the place where the heterogeneous, which was present, confusedly, in studies the French school of sociology carried out on the dualism of the sacred as well as in the notion of ambivalence put forward by psychoanalysis, becomes an autonomous category and turns class relations into its main research subject. As autonomous category, heterology ‘retains only the process of separation of men and groups of men, human unity shattered like glass, exchanging one man for another’ (Bataille, 2018a). However, such a process of separation of men and groups of men constitutes a research object that looks at class relations from a new perspective. As Bataille (2018a) says, men are ‘no longer brothers whether in abundance or misery, but something completely other, a being absolutely foreign, so that we can only provoke, whether feelings of repulsion and nausea, or hypnotic attraction’.

In other words, the heterogeneous appears here as the key to a political project that, transcending the analysis of the psychological structure of fascism, leads, through a study of the ‘laws which characterise […] the relationship of class struggle with the modes of production’ (Bataille, 2018a) and the heterogeneous elements present within the same homogeneity, to an attempt to rethink the principles of Marxism itself by formulating a new revolutionary theory intended to destroy the fetishisation on the left of the Marxist model of seizing power with the aim of toppling autocratic regimes. Relevant in this context is the article ‘Le problème de l’État’ [The Problem of the State] (1933), a controversial statement against the bad conscience of the workers movement: ‘against all likelihood, it still seems to many Communists that Lenin’s book continues to answer any possible difficulty’ (Bataille, 1987a: 335–6), ¹⁰ a sentiment echoed in ‘Dossier hétérologie’ with the peremptory statement of the essay ‘Sur l’état’ [On the State]: ‘Failure of Socialism as a Whole’ (Bataille, 1970c: 175). In 1933, in Critique Sociale, Bataille developed the notion of revolution as a ‘torn conscience’ (Bataille, 1987a: 333) mobilised in the proletariat by the dynamic value of anxiety and its conversion into an ‘autonomous force’ fed by a hatred of the authoritarian state (Bataille, 1987a: 336). This is in explicit contrast with what, in ‘The Problem of the State’, he had called ‘the naïve bourgeois apocalypse’ (Bataille, 1987a: 334) ¹¹ foreseen by Marx and socialism.

The foundation of this new revolutionary theory was the turning of heterology or sacred sociology into a ‘science of forms of authority’ (1987b: 381) assigned to the ‘constitution of a new social structure’ (1987b: 381). More precisely, this meant that, through the implementation of ‘an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion’ (Bataille, 1985e: 159), one could come to predict ‘the affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure’ (Bataille, 1985e: 159) and, where appropriate, use them as a weapon with a view to seizing power. It involved bringing the fabric of contemporary society to light. As Bataille explained some years later in allusions to the sacredness attributed to fascist and Nazi leaders, this fabric was ‘of the same nature as primitive societies’: a ‘ritually lived myth’ (Bataille, 1985g: 232). ¹² Hence the reactivation, used since 1934 immediately after the riots of the extreme right in Place de La Concorde, of the mythological realm understood by Bataille as the ‘corner stone of a science of society’ (Bataille, 2017: 197). Hence also in Contre-Attaque, a movement of revolutionary intellectuals founded in 1935 by Bataille and André Breton, there was a first attempt to oppose the dramatic framework of the decomposing democracies described in ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ by transforming the purely defensive organisation of the Popular Front into a ‘Popular Front in the Street’ – a formula alternative to the ‘Popular Front of combat’ borrowed from the ‘revolutionary Socialist left’ (Bataille, 1985f: 165). This was to be mobilised by the anger of the masses below, an ‘immense tumult of the tide’, as noted in the first edition of the magazine Acéphale, ‘using an image extraordinarily similar to the marine metaphors favoured by Rosa Luxemburg to describe the eruption of revolutionary effervescence’ (Galletti, 2008: 54). The notion of an ‘organic anti-fascist movement’ (Bataille, 1987c: 424) ¹³ guides this new form of political struggle: tied to a violent emotional state more than a political programme, an expression no longer of class interests but of ‘immediate, partly fortuitous and provisional needs […] which in fact animate a given mass at a given place and time’ (Bataille, 1987c: 423), ¹⁴ it makes it possible to overcome both the formless insurrections of the past characterised by the expulsion of lower forms of heterogeneity, and the fascist revolution that, in an act of solidarity with the oppressive power of the homogeneous (the state), drains the lower forms of heterogeneity in the context of higher forms of heterogeneity.

From then onwards, the challenge of Contre-Attaque was to fight fascism on its own ground using the aspirations of the French masses who had not experienced the humiliations and angry demands of the Italian and German masses. The paradox, proposed by the Collège de Sociologie, that ‘human hearts never beat as hard for anything else as they do for death’ (Hollier, 1988: 326), summarises the conditions of this challenge. This paradox is bypassed by the man of industrial civilisation, but reconstructed in the heroic sacrifice of the soldier on the battlefield, celebrated by the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution] that Bataille visited in the spring of 1934. This paradox also mobilised the revolutionary strategy of Contre-Attaque by reactivating a sacred that was foreign to the ‘absorption of the individual in the State’ (Bataille, 2017) – the same sacred that, contrary to nationalist claims, found expression in the playful attitude of Mexicans towards death translated by Eisenstein’s documentary Que viva Mexico! in terms of a ‘party or “ecstasy towards the below” in which the sacrificial movement of the revolution melds with the game of fatally squandering life itself’ (Galletti, 2008: 75). With an element of humour noir, the meeting of Contre-Attaque on 21 January 1936, the anniversary of the beheading of Louis XVI, had in that context the purpose of launching the organic anti-fascist movement: it established, in contrast to the deification of the leader implemented by fascism, the subversive sacredness of the regicidal community. It was in this first manifestation of the headless ‘crowd’ (Bataille, 1985g: 231) that the secret society Acéphale was established, an ‘authentic melting pot of heterogeneity’ that fed and expanded ‘the subversive attack from below experimented during the revolutionary activity of Contre-Attaque’ (Pasi, 1987: 142). The challenge of Acéphale, an ‘attempt at returning to man’s anthropological and cosmological roots’ (Galletti, 2008: 91) by introducing a new anti-Christian and Nietzschean religion, resulted in the sacrificial gesture of the self-mutilation of the head, which is depicted by André Masson’s ‘bonhomme Acéphale’. This ‘announces a humanity that has recovered the freedom of the Earth’ (Hewson, 2016: 162) by overturning the homogeneous world of servile reason in the tragic kingdom of the Dionysian and the chthonic forces, antithetic to the uranic myths of fascism and Nazism.

In fact, accentuating a tendency already evident in the last phase of Contre-Attaque, Acéphale, inseparable from the Collège de Sociologie, a ‘political’ body dedicated to studying myths, power and the sacred, produced a ‘shift in the register of political mobilization': the latter ‘is produced -- in the denunciation of the incapability of politics to answer to the imperious expectation of the “total existence” […] and in the acknowledgement of the impasse of the anti-fascist front – as a “collusion of the political and the religious” (Besnier, 1988: 110), assuming that we give the term “political” […] a wider meaning than the one attached to the mere political contingency; and we bring the term “religious” back to its Durkheimian meaning […]’. Therefore, ‘if “the sacred conspiracy” that opens the first issue of Acéphale sounds like a declaration of war no less imperious than the one that led the fanaticism of Contre-Attaque’ in announcing the fascist invasion of Ethiopia and the undermining of democratic nations under colonial politics, ‘then the weapon with which such war shall be fought would no longer have been revolutionary action with a view to seizing power, but Nietzsche; a Nietzsche removed from both the anti-Semitic falsification of his thinking carried out by Nazism and his political manipulation made by the left, and brought back to a thought that remains “comically unemployable” (Bataille, 1973: 14[…])’ (Galletti, 2018). ¹⁵

Beyond Durkheim and Freud: Heterology and Its Developments in Relation to Sovereignty and the ‘General Economy’

As the ‘science of what is completely other’ (Bataille, 1985a: 102), heterology, which in the article ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ appears – using the Durkheimian sacred/profane model of opposition – rigorously contrary to the homogeneous world, is in fact inextricably implicated in the homogeneous: not only because it relies on its priority or because it makes the interpenetration of the heterogeneous and the homogeneous into the means by which fascism ensures the homogeneity of the whole subordinated to it, but also because, as stated in ‘Definition of Heterology’, it studies the laws that govern its relationship with the homogeneous and the presence, in the homogeneous itself, ‘of heterogeneous constituents in a neutralised state’ (Bataille, 2018a).

But can heterology itself paradoxically become the producer of homology, transforming the other into itself? This is the claim that Nidesh Lawtoo formulated in his article ‘Bataille and the Homology of the Heterology’ in a true head-to-head with ‘Definition of Heterology’ that leads him to disassociate Bataille’s ‘completely other’ from the sacred of the French school of sociology and from the Freudian notion of ambivalence, making it the linchpin of the branch of the ‘science of social relations’ that is focused on ‘the study of class relations’ (Bataille, 2018a). This operation involves, on the one hand, a weakening of the complete opposition Durkheim established between sacred and profane, and on the other, an accentuation of ‘the polarized nature of the elements of the sacred’ (Bataille, 2018a), which was unused by Durkheim and remained unspecified in the psychoanalytical notion of ambivalence; with its transmutations from left sacred to right and vice versa, it mobilises ‘not only religious rituals in primitive, archaic societies, but also […] the body politic in modern, fascist societies’ (Bataille, 2018a) where ‘the prestige of the Brahmin’ (Bataille, 2018a) is substituted by ‘the force of a leader [meneur]’ (Bataille, 1985e: 143); and from yet another perspective, it also gives rise to a questioning of the ‘idealistic’ tendency of each science to cleanse ‘the religion of the original sewer (cloaque initial)’ (Bataille, 2018a) and to banish the impure and vile elements to the realm of the profane.

In ‘Definition of Heterology’ we find the first formulation of the ‘theory of sovereign communication’ (Bataille, 2018a) developed in the post-war period in Inner Experience (1988a), The Accursed Share (1989a) and Sovereignty (1989b). This established, on the re-polarisation of the sacred, the conditions of the theory itself, which was first formulated in the years preceding the Second World War at the Collège de Sociologie and the Société de Psychologie Collective [Society of Collective Psychology], which Bataille founded along with the writer Michel Leiris, the psychoanalysts René Allendy, Adrien Borel and Paul Schiff, and the psychologist Pierre Janet, pioneer of psychoanalysis. This re-polarisation involves, as Lawtoo writes, ‘an immanent move that brings human beings back in touch with the muddy origins from which they stem, introducing a sacred continuity at the heart of profane discontinuities’. This continuity, on the one hand, affects the ontological principles of being as they had been expressed through the ‘exclusion of heterogeneous matters’ in the idealism of Western philosophical thought, and on the other hand, liquidates the premises of psychoanalysis itself: the latter, whilst gaining access ‘directly to eroticism, genitalia and excreta’ (Bataille, 2018a) proper to the ‘sphere of heterology as well’, freezes the impure movement of heterology in the frame of an Oedipal model.

Lawtoo links Bataille’s (2018a) ‘partially incomplete’ explanation, in ‘Definition of Heterology’, of three taboos described by Freud to the forms of ‘pre-verbal, unconscious communication’ Bataille evoked at the Collège de Sociologie. In so doing, he locates heterology in an almost unexplored area of Bataillean research, presenting a foresight ‘nearly a century’ earlier than the current theories of the ‘unconscious forms of imitation’ and, in particular, the recent scientific discovery of ‘mirror neurons’: this is a concept of the open subject starting from Janet’s notion of socius and from what Bataille called ‘lived states’ in the 1930s (Bataille, 1985e) and moving on to the contradictory ‘emotional currents’ generated by heterogeneous itself. This suggests that the ‘so-called “totally other” (tout autre) – be it mud or blood, a leader or a corpse, a newborn or a lover – is intimately rooted into the self, physically and metaphysically tied to its being, so emotionally in contact with ipse that the distinction between “self” and “other” no longer holds’. In other words, the socius, being ‘this heterogeneous other […] indistinguishable from the self’, and drawing, in Bataille’s terms, a ‘primal continuity linking us with everything that is’ (Bataille, 1986: 15), sets into motion ‘a formless bodily communication’ that ‘melts the unity of the ego’ and returns it ‘to a type of muddy and originary, yet ek-static homology’; yet the ipse continues to be pushed ‘in the opposite direction’, so as to not lose its identity ‘in a formless experience of self-dissolution’. But what happens to the term ‘heterology’ in the post-war period, when, under the pressure of the Cold War, the attractive force of communism ‘eliminates from the outset what dares to compete’ (Bataille, 1988b: 231), ¹⁶ on the one hand, and the impossibility of a revolution without a Third World War, on the other, push Bataille to return to the Marxist interpretation of the Hegelian servant/master dialectic in order to formulate ‘the principle of the master-slave opposition in the universal state, where the master subsists and really revolts in the form of childishness (that is literature)’ (Bataille, 1950)? ¹⁷

Re-opening the question of heterology starting with ‘Definition of Heterology’, this edition of Theory, Culture & Society tests its robustness along a labyrinthine path, which, starting with the essays by Marina Galletti and Nidesh Lawtoo, primarily relating to the 1930s, explores the entire breadth of Bataille’s intellectual production: what emerges is a surprising continuity in Bataille’s thinking that, in the constantly reactivated reconfiguration of the heterogeneous, approximates its primitive nucleus and complex implications to concerns that are crucial to contemporary debates.

In this context, ‘Heterology as Aesthetics’ by Kevin Kennedy establishes a genuine essay-bridge that, starting from the 1930s notion of heterogeneity and its link to Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian, but also ‘the overturning of the established order’ (Bataille, 1985a: 100), explores the writer’s journey from a primitive refusal of Surrealist aesthetics and of art in general, object ‘of the great historical systems of appropriation’ (Bataille, 1985a: 97), to the eulogy of ‘Man of Sovereign Art’ (Bataille, 1989b: 418) ¹⁸ understood, no longer, as it was at the Collège de Sociologie, in terms of ‘The Man of Fiction’ (Hollier, 1988: 15), but as the carrier of a radical reversal of the work of art, assigned to take the place of ‘all that in the past – in the remotest past – was sacred’ (Bataille, 1979: 141). ¹⁹ This theory, which Bataille formulated for the first time in relation to Manet, but which was also applied in the literature, in the final pages of Souveraineté, involves redefining the sovereign artist – of which Nietzsche and Kafka are examples – as the ‘uncrowned king’ and ‘declassed’ as much by the liberal regimes, dedicated to the unlimited growth of production, as by communist society, the world of ‘sovereignty […] renounced’ (Bataille, 1989b: 420–6), resulted in the amplification of material interest, which the communist society had wanted to eradicate. The central theme of Kennedy’s essay is the notion of sovereignty that, taken from the heterogeneous and as distant as the heterogeneous from any form of theoretical or philosophical appropriation, diverges on key points. In this sense, referring to the difference established by Bataille in Sovereignty between the unauthentic forms of sovereignty ‘(such as the idea of god, the feudal lord or the fascist leader)’ and ‘sovereign art’, which, prerogative of contemporary man, ‘in the renunciation, indeed in the repudiation of the functions and the power assumed by real sovereignty’ (Bataille, 1989b: 341–4) and therefore it amounts to ‘nothing’, Kennedy identifies ‘two crucial components, one temporal and one spatial’ in the latter: ‘firstly, a suspension of the “concern for the future”, and, secondly, a breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy’, a breakdown that, ‘akin to the shock of the heterogeneous, can only be described negatively’, but which, contrary to the heterogeneous, implicated in political ends, reconfigures sovereign experience ‘as a desire for an absolute immediacy’ and means that this immediacy escapes from the ‘servile’ sphere of political action to become ‘unfulfilled, out of reach, impossible’.

In other words, if in the 1930s, art, producer of aesthetic homogeneity, was disregarded for its lack of revolutionary strength, in the post-war period this lack of effectiveness in terms of political action became, in a surprising convergence with traditional and modern aesthetic theories, the distinctive feature of sovereign art. However, political action, initially attributed to the heterogeneous, became located in the category of the homogeneous enslaved to the principle of utility. This reformulation of heterology that allowed Bataille to resolve the contradiction inherent in his initial theory of heterology, stated as simultaneously autonomous and linked to revolutionary urgency, cleared the way for a ‘heterological’ aesthetic based on the ‘impossibility of ever reducing otherness, as it is manifested in art, to a specific form of politics or emancipation’, without thereby postulating that art lacks epistemological value. This is a value that Kennedy identifies as ‘first and foremost in exposing the limit or the absence of the epistemological, in indicating a realm of experience beyond the limits of reason’. Thus, sovereign art radicalises the contemporary debate between autonomy and heteronomy that places ‘the idea of an inherent political dimension of the aesthetic’, that is, Jacques Rancière’s ‘aesthetic regime of art’ in contrast with the ‘notion of art as an autonomous realm, generating its own truths that resist and challenge the capitalist logic’ as expressed in Philosophy and the Event by Alain Badiou and, above all, in Aesthetic Negativity by Adorno. With the difference that Badiou’s ‘inaesthetics’, despite the ‘affirmation of the fundamental impossibility at the heart of the event’, ends by reaffirming a tie with the political, and the negativity of Adorno rooted in history or rather in capitalism, can potentially evolve into the reconciliation between art and society, where Bataillean sovereignty constitutes, as Kennedy writes, ‘an attempt to articulate a trans- or even ahistorical form of negativity’. More precisely, heterological aesthetics, to the extent that it ‘only derives its sovereignty through a rejection of every form of power or influence’, affirms itself as ‘the sovereign negation of its own autonomy’; to the extent that it places itself ‘in its negative relation to social reality’, it affirms itself as irreducibly heteronomous to the ‘rational requirements of philosophical discourse’.

Linsey McGoey, for her part, identifies in Bataille ‘the most original 20th-century non-economist to foresee a contemporary shift in economic thought’ and at the same time ‘the most conspicuously neglected scholar by today’s heterodox economists’. It was in the 1930s, on the theme of expenditure (dépense), that Bataille formulated his thoughts on economics. Distinct from modern commerce and bartering, it expresses, in antithesis to the tendency of capitalism to limit expenditure, a violent need for loss. Now, if dépense is in part traceable to potlach, from the second half of the 1920s it became also rooted in heterology. And in this context, in opposition to the ‘the still empty notion as it is elaborated on the basis of methodical analysis’ (Bataille, 1985b: 82), it is concretised in the image of the pineal eye similar to a fire that consumes the head. This image was expanded in Contre-Attaque, an appeal to the subversive violence aimed not so much at the transformation of society as at the reaffirmation of the human need for loss; and it found a new formulation in Acéphale, the secret society, and in its public face, the Collège de Sociologie: the former dedicated to the communal experience of a dépense even more tragic than the revolutionary one that Bataille called ‘the joy before death’; the latter dedicated to inscribing the dépense at the very heart of the ‘existential secret society’, on the model of the festival in archaic societies, but in a new dimension that radicalised its scope. Unlike in archaic societies, this no longer involved subordination of the dépense to the preservation of the community but the superimposing of the model of the passionate community of lovers onto the model of archaic societies, which makes the community itself into the occasion for ‘the loss of self in a chaotic universe and in death’ (Hollier, 1988: 338).

Nevertheless, the ‘general economy’, of which the sun ‘that releases energy – wealth – without consideration’ (Bataille, 1976: 35) is the main symbol, represented in the post-war period a radical rethinking of the notion of expenditure: the attempt – in the precarious peace of the post-war that was threatened by both the excessive development of American manufacturing and the Kremlin’s revolutionary desire for world power – to bring politics back to the economic principle that forms it, that is, the ‘use of wealth’, through which societies manage – ‘gloriously’ or catastrophically – the consumption of the excess. In other words, moving towards the resolution of the contradiction ‘between excess and lack’, which was already discussed in ‘Definition of Heterology’, heterology became, starting from the recognition that pure loss is a process central to all consumer societies, the engine for overcoming the ‘restrained’ capitalist economy. The Marshall Plan, an economic plan for converting the excess of the United States into dépense in the form of economic aid to Europe, constitutes this unprecedented breakthrough for Bataille.

No less than the Notion of Expenditure, the ‘general economy’ of The Accursed Share, inspired by the theories of the economist François Perroux and the physicist Georges Ambrosino, would have remained without an echo (in the 1930s the idea of dépense actually caused a rift with the editorial committee of Critique Sociale) in a context that had long been dominated by the spread of ‘marginalist economic theories’, anchored in the ‘study of micro-economic exchange’. The change of direction sparked by the global financial crisis of 2008 and the European crisis forces Bataille back into the limelight, revealing his extraordinary foresight and relevance to current affairs. Here we just need to recall the affinity that McGoey established between the Bataillean concept of ‘condemned wealth’ and the theory of economic surplus developed by two theorists united in their conviction regarding the negative effects of the economic measures imposed by the Versailles Treaty. The first, completely ignored by commentators on Bataille, is Keynes, whose plan for a ‘global currency union’ capable of containing the excessive surplus with economic penalties was supported in 2011 by the then Managing Director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and by a growing number of economists and sociologists. The second is Mauss, whose little-known studies on the cancellation of war debt in the name of a global economy, founded in his own words on the ‘concept […] of co-operation, of a task done or a service rendered for others’ (p. 18), have yet to be fully connected to the most well-known essay on The Gift, which – being so central to Bataille’s Notion of Expenditure and The Accursed Share – may ‘be read as a normative justification for of the policies of sovereign debt forgiveness’ recently re-proposed in the European context by Yanis Varoufakis.

The notion of dépense also overlaps with the article by John Lechte, ‘Heterology, Transcendence and the Sacred: Bataille and Levinas’, which compares the notion of heterology as a discourse on the other, separate from the identity and order of the Same, and Levinas’s concepts of the face of the other as infinite and transcendent.

The closeness between Bataille and Levinas was sanctioned by Bataille himself with a note in the article ‘From Existentialism to the Primacy of Economy’ (Bataille, 1999b), in which he associated the first pages of Thomas the Obscure by Blanchot with what he calls ‘inner experience’ and Levinas’s disturbing characters of the il y a [there is], which are listed in Existence and Existents: ‘The presence of absence, the night, the dissolution of the subject in the night, the horror of being, the return of being to the heart of every negative movement, the reality of irreality are there admirably expressed’ (Levinas, 2001: 63). Similar to the ‘final crushing power of the concentration camp State’ described by Blanchot (1995: 17), ²⁰ but also to the states of mystical participation in the sacred in archaic societies, these ‘expose the subject to the impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable “consummation” of being’ (Levinas, 2001: 57) signalling, as Rocco Ronchi wrote, ‘the disappearance of the existing and of its active power of transcendence’ (Ronchi, 1985: 23).

This extraordinary convergence between Bataille, Blanchot and Levinas is nevertheless the very matrix for their radical difference, which, in the words of Ronchi, can be summarised in these terms: while Levinas proceeded from the inhumane consumption of existence that links with the Bataillean notion of dépense ‘towards the position of the subject (existant) and hence it moves further towards an ethical re-founding of subjectivity’, in contrast, Bataille moves from the subject towards the existence considered as orgiastic squandering of energy (Ronchi, 1985: 38–9). Bataille himself, if he linked Inner Experience to the il y a, it was to immediately erode this proximity with two decisive distinctions: the first, inherent to the existentialist position of Levinas: ‘Levinas describes and Blanchot cries – as it were – the il y a’ (Bataille, 1999b: 168); the second, focused on the same il y a, which finds expression in anguish, where internal experience is produced by the conversion of anguish into ecstasy: ‘Levinas defines the fact of being by telling the horror he feels. Another would have drawn from the same fact drunkenness, joy, or ecstasy’ (Bataille, 1999b: 170).

But can this contrast, contrary to Bataille, conceal a more complex configuration or even fall into unexpected tangents? Starting from the assumption that modernity is established in the exclusion of sacred ambivalence and leads to the opposition not only between sacred and profane, but between what Giorgio Agamben (1998: 4) called bare life, or rather ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’, completely lacking transcendence, and life as the ‘form or way of living’, touched by transcendence, Lechte develops a series of interesting hypotheses intended to test – starting from the primitive separation of man from animals and considering the latter as bare life, but also from the reduction, in modernity, of man to bare life in terms of the ‘satisfaction or otherwise of (what are called) basic biological or “natural” needs’ – an unprecedented perspective: that of a Bataille who, far from contributing towards the division between sacred and profane, was the founder of ‘transcendental materialism’: there is ample proof, to cite one example, of the fact that, in his vision of man, Bataille includes animal needs, an expression of bare life, and tasks heterology with bringing them to light as an excluded part, showing that bare life is ‘part of culture and thus [has] a degree of transcendence’.

The separation between sacred and profane collapses in Levinas also, for whom ‘Life is love of life’, ‘never reducible to “bare life”, where life, as Lechte wrote, is first of all mere aliveness’. What would bring us back to bare life – from which transcendence is excluded – would still be work if it were not for the rest or déchet [waste] that work itself produces. Since waste, or rather ‘what is not included as much as what is excluded from work’, leaves a sign, a trace, and the trace, for Levinas, ‘is the mode of the Other’s abiding presence […] and so is evocative of transcendence’. Linking Bataille and Levinas, beyond the existence in both of them of ‘residues of European modernity’s distinctions between the sacred and the profane’, is therefore the underground opening of heterology and the face of the other to life understood as ‘as a way of life’.

Lastly, Michèle Richman, in ‘Bataille’s Prehistoric Turn: The Case for Heterology’, extending the homogeneity/heterogeneity contradiction beyond the 1930s and its subsequent reconfiguration in the continuity/discontinuity contradiction, analyses the methods by which the completely other reappeared in the author’s last essays, dedicated to prehistory, or rather to the ‘human past’ that has been ‘consigned to oblivion by traditional historiography’ and encompasses the transition from animality to humanity. Two methods are involved: the first, already used by the Collège de Sociologie to introduce the obscure horrifying nucleus that constitutes the sacred, but also in the ‘method of meditation’ used in the post-war period and borrowed from Rudolf Otto who used it to represent the impossibility of words to encompass the ‘completely other’ in a precise formula: silence; the second, indivisible from the first, is the notion of sovereignty, as explored in Bataille’s last works, ‘by the majestic animals encountered on the Lascaux walls’. These two methods are at the heart of what Richman, in contrast with modern intolerance towards the transgression of the sacred, identifies as the new special feature of Bataille’s economics: ‘the technique of interruption’. Sovereign silence and the technique of interruption made up the new formulation through which heterology again erupted into Bataille’s thinking to restore ‘the continuum disrupted when archaic humans invented work, language, and a temporality subordinated to the future’.

More precisely, the new aesthetic of silence as a condition for accessing totality, as defined by Bataille in his texts on prehistory, marks the beginning of a ‘counter-history’ which, starting from the ‘sensible traces’, can be read as a calling into question of the very rationality of modernity ‘by instants of sovereign revolt’. In this context, Richman focuses on three areas. The first, which she calls ‘communication before speech’, juxtaposes two Acephalous figures that reveal the scandalous power of silence as an ‘unlimited violation of the prohibition that man’s reason opposes to violence’ (Bataille, 1988c: 483): the statue of the headless bear in the caves at Montespan, which Bataille, at odds with historians, associated with sacrificial rituals in front of agricultural encampments, and Masson’s headless figure around which, in contrast to the ‘sovereign individual[ism] constructed by the ideologies of economic rationality and political liberalism’, the ‘sacred conspiracy of silence’ of Acéphale was cemented. The second direction, condensed into the formula ‘the religious before religion’, raises the controversial link established by Bataille between the ‘burial pits’ of Neanderthal man and the religious rituals connected with the recognition of death in a world in which man had not yet distinguished himself from animals. The third direction, ‘markings before art’, uses the enigmatic wall paintings in the cave at Lascaux, a masterpiece of the upper Palaeolithic age, depicting a bird-headed, ithyphallic man, dead (or dying), stretched out in front of a mortally wounded bison, as an illustration of that paradoxical truth that rationalism took away from modern man: the harmony between death and eroticism. Restoring the continuum between man and animal that was ‘disrupted when mankind submitted, among other interdictions, to the law of language’, heterology conveyed by the sovereign silence of prehistory turns ‘traditional definitions of political and religious sovereignty’, which imply submission, into ‘the will to resist domination’. Thus the ‘instants of sovereign revolt’ act against ‘the limitations of modern humans’. Simultaneously, they bring resistance to the terrible ‘process of separation of men and groups of men, human unity shattered like glass, exchanging one man for another, no longer brothers whether in abundance or misery, but something completely other, a being absolutely foreign’ (Bataille, 2018a).

The final three contributions show how Bataille’s thought continues to be effective for the contemporary political context. Sunil Manghani reinterprets Roland Barthes’ essays on George Bataille, The Metaphor of the Eye and Les sorties du textes, in the light of the later writings Mythologies and The Neutral. He explores the subtle tangencies between the two authors by starting from their common reference to Nietzsche. The central themes of Manghani’s essay are the irreducibility to the ‘restricted’ economy (McGoey, 2018; in this issue) both of the formless of Bataille – which Manghani understands as the manifest of heterology – and of the neutral of Barthes, i.e. what escapes both from the constituted order and from the ‘doxosphère’ of every ideology.

William Pawlett’s piece focuses on Bataille’s use of the categories of left and right sacred and the mutations generated by the progressive dissolution of the left sacred into the profane. Pawlett’s analysis is interesting in the way he attempts to relate such categories to Baudrillard’s reflections upon globalised society. From this perspective, two notions would seem to be central. The first is ‘symbolic exchange’, a notion that is comparable with ‘the force of subversion’, which Bataille assigns to the contemporary sacred. The second notion is the most recent ‘transparency of evil’, considered both in terms of the destination of the conversion of capitalism’s dualism good/evil into happiness/disgrace and in terms of the paradoxical place in which the heterogeneous and repulsive force of the left sacred is reactivated, as in the case of the suicidal/sacrificial September 11 attacks.

In contrast, Eugene Brennan focuses on Bataille’s writings of the 1930s on fascism and its analogies with Islam, the Acéphale and the two pieces ‘Sur Nietzsche’ and ‘La limite de l’utile’. Starting from these writings, he makes the incorporation of the political into the religious the germinative nucleus of Bataille’s conceptualisation of the economy. This is in the light of what Jean-Joseph Goux, in agreement with Benjamin, calls the ‘religion of capitalism’, and in the light of the very recent reflection of Michel Surya upon the connivances between the religious radicalism of neo-capitalism after the fall of the Berlin wall and jihadist fundamentalism.

Finally, to conclude the issue, there is a second paper by Bataille, ‘L’ambiguïté du plaisir et le jeu’, which is now published for the first time in English. This is a lecture given on the invitation of Lacan in Sainte-Anne on 21 October 1958. As Elisabeth Roudinesco recalls:

not only did Lacan draw on the Nietzscheanism of Bataille in order to have a new understanding of such philosophy […] but he was also initiated by Bataille into an original understanding of Sade’s work. Thanks to this, Lacan came to a theorization of the issue of jouissance without any Freudian influence. Moreover, he drew inspiration from Bataille’s reflections on the impossible and heterology in order to articulate the concept of real, considered first as ‘reste’ [what remains] and then as ‘impossible’. (Roudinesco, 1993: 188)^21,22

Another important contribution to the debate that followed the conference of Bataille came from the psychoanalyst Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni. In 1987, she – as a member of the École freudienne – published, together with her reservations about Bataille’s distancing from Freud in this conference and her analysis (published in 1996 in the journal Esprit) on the difference between the dispositive of inderdict and of transgression at play in Bataille’s romance Ma mère and Lacan’s notion of limit, the notes which her spouse Paul Lemoine wrote straight off. She published also the theses of Oscar Mannoni and Lacan. On the one hand, by appealing to the play of Fort-Da, Mannoni confutes the assimilation of play to pleasure made by Bataille. On the other hand, Lemoine-Luccioni highlights that, in Lacan’s view, ‘There is no radical opposition between play and science; on the contrary, there are a series of gradations’; moreover, there is desire beyond the principle of pleasure (Lemoine-Luccioni, 1987: 68). ²²

Translated by Arianna Bove