Vincent and Theo (Robert Altman, 1990)
Georges Bataille was a a librarian and anthropologist who never held any professorial position of any kind. When he was severely ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and in serious financial distress at the beginning of the 1960s, a large group of artists and public intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró—joined forces to raise a considerable sum of money that would see to it that Bataille lived out his final days in comfort, which is indeed how it would come to pass. In his theoretical work, Bataille pulls heavily from anthropology and aberrations of history so as to unearth insights relating to eroticism, mysticism, sacrifice, and political economy within a context where excess (the “accursed share,” etc.) remains central, and his fiction has a general tendency to depict an erotic interiority characterized by the tempestuous play of sensory-motor intensities (the experience of excess, of too much, arousing and frightening). In his own preface to the short vignette called “Madame Edwarda,” a piece originally published under the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Pierre Angélique, Bataille writes of “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress” and an “unbearable surpassing of being” in relation to sexual arousal and climax. This is indeed at the heart of Bataille’s fiction, a body of work that may be the best we have on the diabolic power of sensory-motor excitation, with the possible exception of Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas who has never found a profound metaphysical concept that he was not able to place in the human nervous system, along with the hormones and the gristle, and have it take…like a compatible organ transplant. In “Madame Edwarda,” the narrator pursues the eponymous prostitute (who declares herself GOD), has a dalliance with her, is beaten and wildly excoriated by her, and finally watches her fuck the driver from the back seat of his cab, all three parties somehow achieving a sufficient level of frenzied excitation that they…completely lose consciousness. Lights out. The narrator rhapsodizes on how “the pungent odor of her flesh and mine commingled flung us both into the same heart’s utter exhaustion.” The same heart. A heart that now incorporates two people. Then later, as Madame Edwarda, organ of GOD, fucks the cabdriver: “little by little that embrace strained to the final pitch of excess at which the heart fails.” The heart fails. The shared heart fails. The French sometimes call the moments after orgasm a petite mort. Have they taken the time to think through the possible implications? The reason I loved Bataille’s short novel Blue of Noon so much in my early twenties was because it was the only place in literature where I’d seen a genuine equivalent for my own anxiety, disgust, and terror…my own viscerally alienated mood. (I’m proud to report that I did not share any of the necrophiliac fantasies.) I didn’t know these parts of myself could be captured because I only faintly knew then that they were there to begin with. That’s what William S. Burroughs said we were here for: to find out and know what we already know but don’t know that we know. In the 1930s, the interwar circus, the young Bataille believed that time and spirit were Heraclitian flux and the heart—or Nuclear Reactor Core—of Nietzschean Tragedy, inherently "horror-spreading." He believed in “agitation on the scale of irreducible needs,” and the idea that humanity seems “able to subsist only at the limits of horror.” That would be the anthropologist speaking. Bataille is definitely not the kind of guy to lose sleep over reports of a nasty bloodbath. "The Practice of Joy Before Death." Bataille had become a devout Catholic as a teenager, converting at the age of sixteen, and his ultimate violent rejection of God becomes a violent rejection of the head as well as its own kind of display of orgasmic celestial fireworks exclusively for the head, as the head is seen as “the conscious authority of God” keeping one subservient to form, function, and programming. The living mandate of the flaming creature: myth, heterogeneous intensity, excretion, combustion, heated passion, sacrifice, the sacred, the wretched of the earth. Georges Bataille looks at the sunflowers of Vincent van Gogh and sees much more clearly than most people that the sunflowers are screaming in pain. You know, there’s a thin line between paranoid psychosis and overstimulation.
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