“… In a sense, authentic consumption ought to be solitary, but then it would not have the completion that the action it has on the other confers on it… The exemplary virtue of the potlatch is given in this possibility for man to grasp what eludes him, to combine the limitless movements of the universe with the limit that belongs to him.
2. The apparent absurdity of gifts.
But ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it too,’ the saying goes… “ (The Accursed Share 70).
“Plants manifest the same excess, but it is much more pronounced in their case. They are nothing but growth and reproduction [emphasis mine] (the energy necessary for their functional activity is neglible). But this indefinite exuberance must be considered in relation to the conditions that make it possible - and that limit it” (The Accursed Share 28).
The paradox at the heart of Bataille’s thought is that we can never “have [our] cake and eat it too.” In this essay, I will examine the nature of this paradox, arguing that it truly is fundamental—to use Bataille’s terms, as human beings, we are inevitably split between the “profane” and the “sacred;” “production” and “consumption;” homogeneity and heterogeneity [want to find/cite source]; and, most essentially, between submission to “duration” and “sovereignty” in the “instant”—while at the same time suggesting an immanent praxis that can carve a Buddhist-inspired “middle path” through the “apparent absurdity” of these irreconcilable contradictions. Drawing from Alexander Irwin’s Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred, I conceptualize this “middle path” as a Deleuzean “becoming” between Simone Weil’s rigid intellectualism and moralism and Bataille’s fluid emphasis on animality and “base materialism.” As Irwin writes, Bataille and Weil both attempted to “be the message: to put in the reader’s hands a text consubstantial with the writer’s own self, to live a life crafted as a vehicle of poetic, spiritual, and political meaning” (Saints of the Impossible xviii); I argue that this ultimately impossible mission—to craft the self “as a vehicle of poetic, spiritual, and political meaning”—is akin to Buddhist, and especially Mahayana Buddhist, soteriology, which prescribes an immanent praxis of upaya or “skillful means” for the cessation of suffering of all living beings. Finally, following how both Bataille and Weil considered plant life and its direct relationship with the sun in their respective writings and lives, with Weil in particular describing the action of “grace” as a kind of “photosynthesis” in her later writings, I give this praxis the term “becoming-tree,” loosely inspired by Karen Houle’s work on the Deleuze and Guattari concept of “becoming-plant.” (thank you to Craig for the “becoming-plant” Acid Horizon episode) With “becoming-tree,” I specifically have in mind the “lightning-struck oak” where Acephale met in secret. It’s a poetic coincidence that this tree—probably but not certainly the no-longer-extant “Oak of Joyenval” (The Sacred Conspiracy ed. Brotchie and Galletti)—remains undetermined and secret to this day.
The paradox I hope to reconcile with “becoming-tree” concerns the self’s relationship to time. How does one communicate an idea through the self as a text while that same self—namely, the self in its immanent form as the living human body—is ceaselessly subjected to time’s movement until the moment of death? Another way of phrasing the paradox: how does one give form to the fundamental “formlessness” of the living self qua self? Weil and Bataille overlap in their apophaticism—in “Implicit Forms of the Love of God,” for example, Weil uses similar mystical language to Bataille’s in describing an ungraspable “true light” and “silence” of the universe (“Implicit Forms of the Love of God,” Waiting for God 100). The two diverge in how they position themselves against the apophatic wound of time: Weil, I would argue, is primarily a thinker of plantlike stillness, Bataille a thinker of animal flux. Weil suggests “waiting for God” through the “negative effort” of paying attention (“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” Waiting for God 61), while Bataille, in the essay “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” for example, emphasizes the fundamental role of “chance” in becoming (Visions of Excess 230). To use terms from Bataille’s “The Obelisk,” which directly concerns the human body’s relationship to time, Weil was a “centripetal” thinker, while Bataille was “centrifugally” flung into animal passion (“The Obelisk,” Visions of Excess 219).
Irwin introduces Saints of the Impossible with an analysis of Bataille’s novel The Blue of Noon. The main character Troppmann can be read as largely representative of Bataille, while Lazare, a strident Marxist revolutionary, is a clear fictionalization of Simone Weil. Irwin reads Lazare as symbolic of Bataille’s concept of the “sacred”; Troppmann, a character whose excessive animal nature is emphasized throughout the novel, falls in a kind of “love” with Lazare, who fascinates as much as she repulses him (Saints of the Impossible 88). While a caricature, Lazare is not a complete fabrication—Weil, by all accounts, did seem to be almost superhumanly demanding in her adherence to moral ideals. As Irwin describes, Lazare’s is seemingly the only body in the novel not driven by shifting, incomplete, recognizably human desire: as with the real life Weil, she seems to have integrated an almost impossibly pure revolutionary idealism into her immanently lived self-concept. In contrast with Troppmann, and with Bataille in general, Lazare/Weil seems to be absolutely sexless, all of her desire channeled through the head. Her character is representative of the “sacred” in that it’s an image of almost alien impossibility: Weil/Lazare is above the recognizably human, Troppmann, in his animal lust, below.
Weil’s writing reflects this quality—a nearly alien commitment to eternal Platonic ideals of truth, justice, and so on. Even beyond mere abstract commitment, she relates basic animal drives, like the drive to eat, to her ideals, saying in “Implicit Forms,” for example, that the beauty of the world is our “food.” Without making my analysis overly dependent on biography, Weil’s disordered relationship with food throughout her life—eventually dying at a very young age because of a refusal to eat—can be read as an overzealous asceticism: an attempt to minimize, to the point of pathology, the will’s dependence on bodily drives. Weil was, in a phrase, pathologically “sacred,” which rendered her paradoxically ineffective as an agent of revolutionary praxis, her ideals only truly shining through in the almost entirely disembodied, static, dead form that is writing. She did not, for example, effectively contribute to the anarchist effort in the Spanish Civil War, failing to recognize the limitations imposed by her embodied self as a French civilian, a literal schoolteacher: as the famous anecdote goes, her inexperience and lack of physical capacity made her more of a burden to her anarchist compatriots than anything else, and she soon had to return home to her parents in France after she injured herself accidentally stepping into a pot.
Through the incredible power of her intellect, Weil seems to have integrated Platonic ideals into her bodily drives so deeply that she returned, not merely to Bataille’s id-driven animality, but to an embodied existence more akin to the still, slow, rooted life of plants, and her writing directly reflects this. Beyond the central importance of “roots” to her political philosophy, Weil speaks of grace as a kind of “chlorophyll”—she writes in her notebooks that “the source of man’s moral energy lies outside him, as does that of his physical energy (food, respiration)… There is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light… There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light” (Notebooks of Simone Weil Vol. 1 222-23). Overlapping with Bataille’s consideration of the limitless energy of the sun in “The Solar Anus,” The Accursed Share, and elsewhere, Weil also writes in the essay “The First Condition for the Work of a Free Person:”
“The sun and the sap in the plants speak continually in the fields of what is the greatest thing in the world. We do not live by anything else but solar energy. We eat it, and it keeps us on our feet, it makes our muscles move, it operates bodily in all our acts. It is, perhaps under diverse forms, the only thing in the universe that constitutes a force opposed to gravity; it is what rises into the trees, what lifts loads through our arms, what drives our motors. It comes from an inaccessible source that we cannot approach even by one step. It comes down on us continually. But although it bathes us perpetually, we cannot capture it. Only the vegetable element of chlorophyll can capture it for us and make food out of it. It is only necessary that the earth be suitably managed by our efforts; then, through chlorophyll, solar energy becomes something solid and enters into us as bread, as wine, as oil, as fruits” (Late Philosophical Writings 138).
In the Preface to The Accursed Share, Bataille states a desire for a “lucid attitude” to the political problem imposed by the necessity of “expenditure” of the sun’s energy, which expenditure takes both “productive” and “nonproductive” forms. In the utopian socialist vision expressed in Weil’s “First Condition,” as well as in the larger manifesto The Need for Roots, this “lucid attitude” is expressed in the image of workers cultivating the bodily drive to work directly from their attention to the beauty and justice of the work itself, its necessity in the social sphere. In other words, in these texts, Weil describes a world of pure “productive expenditure,” where workers consume, in the form of Weil’s grace as “photosynthesis,” the products of their own work. They become like trees making up a rich forest ecosystem, the green leaves in the canopy receiving the heavenly light both of Bataille’s “ideal” and “rotten” suns. To put it in Mahayana Buddhist terms, it is a world of pure “skillful means,” in which every person is a socialist-inflected bodhisattva delaying their own enlightenment in order to “manage the Earth” and help others to release themselves from suffering.
If Weil is pathologically sacred, falling too far on the side of the head and its static idealism, then Bataille is pathologically excessive and ambulatory, falling too far on the side of animal bodily drives. He moves too fast, wants too much, always attempting to bypass the inhibitions imposed by the head’s ideality—the most extreme example of this being his failed act of ecstatic self-sacrifice in asking the other members of Acephale to ritualistically murder him. In Saints of the Impossible, Irwin quotes Weil commenting on the contrast in their revolutionary styles:
“‘The revolution is for him [Bataille] the triumph of the irrational, for me of the rational; for him a catastrophe, for me a methodical action in which one must strive to limit the damage; for him the liberation of the instincts, and notably those that are generally considered pathological, for me a superior morality. What is there in common? [… ] How is it possible to coexist in the same revolutionary organization when on one side and the other one understands by revolution two contrary things?’” (Saints of the Impossible 84).
Just as Bataille seems to have implicitly understood in The Blue of Noon that Weil represented something missing in his praxis, Weil recognizes the need for these contrary styles to coexist. But what form would this reconciliation take? I would like to suggest Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, as depicted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as a mythic precursor to the Weil/Lazare and Bataille/Troppmann romantic coupling. The sun god Apollo angers Eros with his arrogance, Apollo making fun of Eros’s bow as inferior to his, with Eros replying: “‘Your arrows, Apollo, can shoot / whatever you choose, but I’ll shoot you [emphasis mine]. As mortal creatures / must yield to a god, your glory will likewise prove to be subject / to mine.’” Reason—the head—can master everything except itself: it is wounded by its own desire, desire which has to be actualized by the living body in time. In his pursuit of Daphne, Apollo’s claim that he can “reveal the past, the present and future to all who seek them” means nothing—Daphne is always a step ahead, eluding his grasp. Finally, in desperation, Daphne cries out to her father, the river god Peneus, to make her beauty inaccessible “by changing / [her] form!”
“She had hardly ended her prayer when a heavy numbness / came over her body; her soft white bosom was ringed in a layer / of bark, her hair was turned into foliage, her arms into branches. The feet that had run so nimbly were sunk into sluggish roots; / her head was confined in a treetop; and all that remained was her beauty” (Metamorphoses trans. David Raeburn (Penguin) 32-33).
The reconciliation of these paradoxes—again, between production and consumption, homogeneity and heterogeneity, submission to “duration” and ecstasy in the “instant”—can be found, finally, in the image of Bataille’s “pineal eye” becoming “rooted,” in the sense of Weil’s term “roots:” “a human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future” (The Need for Roots 40). The key phrase here is “living shape.” In “The Jesuve,” Bataille writes of human evolution as developing more and more expressivity in the “conflagration” of the face, as opposed to the opposite movement seen in certain apes toward the ass as a site of expression—he then imagines a further evolution, in this upward direction, of a “pineal eye” that would stare directly into the unlimited excess of the sun (Visions of Excess 77). We can imagine this eye as akin to Weil’s “chlorophyll” in that it would have direct access to the central apophatic element of Bataille’s cosmological vision, the sun (in Weil’s case, this apophatic element is the Christian God). My final claim is that the “conflagration” of the human face—specifically, the face of the erotic Other, described as the “image of the loved one” in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (Visions of Excess 228)—is the site of both production and consumption for the “restricted economy” of the human species and its libidinal drives. It is, in other words, the “sun” of this vast economy: the human face’s expressivity “gives without ever receiving” (The Accursed Share 28). And yet it also, silently, indiscernibly, receives beauty in its still solitude; it “eats” the beauty of the world, to use Weil’s metaphor. The face receives, consumes, and precisely at the same time, it produces, communicates, gives its own beauty: a true Heraclitean union of oppositions. You can, in fact, “have your cake and eat it too,” but only if you accept both the infinite speed and infinite slowness of the human face’s becoming. The concept of “original face” in Zen Buddhism is relevant here, the concept being both a material, immanent reality and a paradoxical abstraction for the practitioner to contemplate in meditation. One can imagine Bataille meditating on the face of Lazare/Weil as a site of erotic “joy before death,” the face both an image and immanent reality, his own animal speed slowing as he approaches, with the intent to seduce, this impossibly sacred figure, her own beauty growing more distant, ancient, and eternal, growing closer to but never quite embodying the Zen maxim of “living as though already dead.”
[Vertigo clip explanation: I’d like to show my favorite scene from Hitchcock’s Vertigo because I think it has some uncanny resonances with the Bataille/Troppmann/Apollo and Weil/Lazare/Daphne archetypal coupling. If you haven’t seen Vertigo, I won’t give anything away; all you need to know is that Jimmy Stewart’s character Scotty is a private detective investigating and becoming increasingly fascinated by and obsessed with Kim Novak as “Madeleine,” who is not who she really says she is, and all Scottie knows is that she has a deathwish, and in a previous scene he saved her from drowning herself in the San Francisco Bay. In this scene, they visit the redwood forest. Hopefully the resonances will be readily apparent. ("Madeleine" here is a "sacred" figure, like Weil/Lazare/Daphne (to give away the twist, she's a ghost back from the dead (Lazarus-like)); she wants to become ancient and eternal like the trees: escape this body, this life; escape being pursued and possessed by men)]