The Anti-Phallic Perspective

In the 1930s, Georges Bataille engaged in an anti-fascist resistance that was more aesthetic than party-political, for example in the group Contre-Attaque. He strictly rejected the aims of the National Socialists and Fascists. In a boundless fantasy of transgression, he became interested in the sacred, ecstasy, violence, sacrificial rituals, and the violation of social taboos (transgression). Fascism also exploited these spheres for its mass spectacles. In the essay "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" (1933), Bataille recognized that fascism appealed to forces excluded by the rational, bourgeois world (the "homogeneous"). Bataille analyzed the affective energy that fascist leaders exerted over the masses. He wanted to understand why this movement was so successful. He attempted to harness these heterogeneous, irrational energies for a leftist/surrealist revolution. Critics accused him of imitating the demagoguery of fascism. With the secret society "Acéphale" ("Headless"), he practiced mystical rituals. To observers, this evoked associations with totalitarian cults, even though the goal was entirely different: the liberation of the individual.

Bataille dissected fascism. Faced with its murderous reality, he knew no hesitation. During the German occupation, he used his position to protect his estranged Jewish wife, Sylvia Maklès, from deportation and extermination. His ethics proved incorruptible.

His second wife, Princess Diane Kotchoubey de Beauharnais, challenged him in a contest of literary excess. Diane surpassed Bataille by far in her adaptation of sexual motifs. Writing under a pseudonym, she published erotic novels.

Bataille drank from the sources of his muses. Laure died young, Sylvia turned toward Lacan, leaving Diane, who confronted Bataille on the field of obscenity. A high priest of transgression as a parasite of female energies; he drinks from the sources of his muses. He needs their uncompromising intensity. Laure and Diane are obsessive eroticists.

Laure, the Sacred Martyrdom

She chose absolute self-expenditure. Her Catholic schism drove her into a feverish intensity that knew no bourgeois safeguards. She died young, consumed by tuberculosis and radicality. She burned herself out; he administered her ashes.

Egon Schiele might have painted her as he painted himself shortly before his own frenziedly early death.

Sylvia left the theorist of sin and turned — at a moment of utmost historical urgency — toward Jacques Lacan. With him she lived underground and survived the Nazis.

With strategic grandeur, Diane used pornography to build a bestselling career. She surpassed Bataille in writing and in life.

Diane Kotchoubey de Beauharnais married Bataille after the war and, in the mid-1950s, published the pornographic novel The Whip Angels under the pseudonym Selena Warfield. The book appeared in 1955 through Olympia Press. Unlike de Sade and other male apologists of libertinage, The Whip Angels is not narrated primarily from the position of male desire. This is not the phallic perspective. The novel takes the form of the diary of a young woman. The protagonist observes her own development. External events generate inner experience. This is certainly in tune with a popular tenor of the time: inner transformation, psychic permeability, ambivalence.

This is where the connection to Bataille becomes fascinating. Bataille himself constantly moves at the point where classical masculine sovereignty collapses. His eroticism revolves around the loss of control, dissolution of the self, ecstasy, and self-abandonment.

De Sade displays the logic of masculine sovereignty. Bataille shows its collapse. Diane explores and scales what desire looks like from female experience once an inherited order has already begun to fracture.

I would not go so far as to say that Bataille's writings — from Histoire de l'œil to L'Érotisme — are protocols of vampirism. Let us substitute another scholar in his place. Someone who grants us more freedom. Cornelius heats himself at the embers of his women and copies their clandestine epiphanies.

The Asymmetry of Dead and Text

Laure, Diane, and Sylvia stake their bodies, minds, and lives. The master remains in transcendence and at the writing desk. Bataille remains the bourgeois civil servant. As a librarian (at the Bibliothèque nationale, later in Orléans), he catalogues, orders, and administers the knowledge of the world — and preserves Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Psychologically, this is also how he relates to his women. He manages and safeguards their existential fire. He is an archivist of their excesses.

No, that does not work. You cannot accuse him of that so casually. Take Cornelius instead and say it about him.

The Librarian as Alchemist

Cornelius uses the radicality of his women as raw material. He pours their burning lives into the cold mold of philosophical abstraction. At the end stands the merciless truth that Clarice L. hinted at so precisely in the Café de Flore: Cornelius is a voyeur. While Laure burns with fever, Sylvia prepares herself for the underground and gives herself to the master of psychoanalysis, and Diane encourages an inspector to become bolder, Cornelius remains only the chronicler. He sits in his palace of thought ...

Prison-Note Prose and Sacred Martyrdom

In the mid-1930s, Bataille initiated a conspiracy against his age: the secret society "Acéphale." Its emblem was the headless man — a radical rejection of the tyranny of bourgeois reason, a symbol of naked life.

The Alchemy of Desecration and the Weak Priest

Should we now also make Cornelius the master of a clandestine sworn brotherhood? In Laure's posthumous writings, the autobiographical fragments of Histoire d'une petite fille, he discovers a scene of dizzying consequence: sodomy on an altar. To translate the immense force of this scene for the modern gaze, one must understand the metaphysical weight that rested on Laure's shoulders from childhood onward. This was not an extravagant act. It was the deliberate summoning of a schism within one's own flesh.

Her episodic narration circles obsessively around the moral decay of her origins. She dissects the concealed improprieties of dignitaries and priests who, under the protection of their silk robes and cassocks, steal moments of pleasure. In bigotry, sin remains negotiable as long as the façade holds. Fascinated, Laure observes a laundress and considers her, far removed from the neurotic compulsions of the upper classes, to be a genuinely happy person.

In Bataille she finds the ideal infernal accomplice for her mystery. She recognizes in him not only the radical thinker, but the priest weak in the flesh. Bataille had been a seminarian at Saint-Flour. He aspired to ordination; he wanted to wear the habit. He was not a banal freethinker but a renegade of faith who spoke the vocabulary of sin fluently. For Laure, he embodied the ultimate fulfillment of her obsession: the fallen clergyman whose moral collapse in the act does not annihilate the sacred, but instead inflames it all the more.

Dear T.,

Yes, I understand the narrative twist very well. And no, it does not fundamentally go too far. Literarily speaking, it is probably the strongest idea you have developed so far in connection with Bataille. It is so strong that it awakens my desire while I sit here at my institute desk and would very much like to have you within physical reach. A quickie right now; I would gladly describe the details obscenely to you, but then I fear once again that you might use them one way or another. I know that nothing can stop you from exploiting things in writing, and somehow even that turns me on. How can that be?

Back to your question. You must balance with extreme precision, otherwise you turn an interpretive tension into a psychological denunciation. You are not describing the "real" Bataille, but a structural asymmetry between life and writing. And this asymmetry is real.

The women around Bataille — Colette Peignot, Sylvia Maklès, Diane de Beauharnais — appear in your text as existential embodiments. You associate them with illness, risk, sexual expenditure, and social endangerment.

Bataille writes, orders, archives, sublimates. He transforms experience into theory.

The dangerous point lies here:

"He uses their fire as raw material."

That quickly slips into an accusation you can scarcely sustain historically. Especially in Laure's case, this would be problematic, because she herself was a thinker and not merely a muse eventually consumed. This is why your text works best where you formulate things not morally but structurally-symbolically. There the librarian idea suddenly becomes brilliant.

For Bataille is an archivist, cataloguer, administrator of knowledge, a bureaucrat of order. At the same time, he writes about expenditure and ecstasy. The constellation is almost too perfect.

The librarian as secret alchemist. The man of order as theorist of excess. That has literary power.

But you should be careful with formulations such as:

"He manages his women."

Stronger would be: Bataille transforms the existential intensity of his surroundings into language.

Or stronger still: The women live what Bataille archives.

For then you are describing a difference of form, not guilt.

The sentence:

"He is an archivist of their excesses" is excellent. I am memorizing it now, interrupting myself. My good friend and reliable fuck, I dedicate my approaching climax to you. Only you can do this.

And the section about the "weak priest" may be the strongest of all. Bataille's seminary years, Catholic grammar of guilt, Laure as seeker of schism, eroticism as consecrating desecration, the sacred as the ideal setting for sodomy. That is truly well observed.

Dear T., what do you think of this?

The Phenomenon of Sexual Fare-Dodging

The bourgeois, Catholic, and patriarchally structured superego forbids women from actively indulging in lustful initiative. Salvation arrives through a refined exchange of roles. The violence and aggression of desire are shifted entirely onto the male side. It is the crowd of loiterers, predatory men, plumbers, electricians, priests, and inspectors who populate this literary stage. They are intruders from another social sphere. They allow the heroines to experience something they themselves could never actively permit themselves to experience. The man provides the ticket to sin, to transgression, and the woman rides fare-free into the abyss.

Yet neither Laure nor the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector remains trapped in the comfortable role of passive victim. At a certain point in writing, they catch themselves in the act. They see through their own game and recognize: It was not he who seduced me. I made him seduce me.

Pleasure is the ultimate proof of existence in a deathly empty world, and at the same time an act of supreme sovereignty. The female actor disempowers the man a second time:

"You were only my instrument. The sin belongs to me. The damnation belongs to me."

If one needs damnation in order to climax.

To be continued.