I liked your report on Ginzburg's lecture on the College de Sociologie.

Surely you -- and presumably Ginzburg -- are right to remark on how close Bataille's thought comes to a fascist celebration of violence for its own sake. However, my reading of Bataille is that the whole point is that fascism, in the conceptual world that subtends capitalism, can't be made into a thing one opposes. That is, it can't be rigidified into the Hegelian position of that thing "opposite" democracy, or communism. Rather, it has to be overcome. Overcoming, in this way of thinking, does not operate by way of stabilizing oppositions and picking which side one is on.

This is definitely disputable. But it is the point of view one gets from Bataille. The overcoming in Bataille seems to go like this: the image of sovereignty that fascism offers -- which is very much like the pathetic image of a man offering himself up for sacrifice (B. wouldn't quibble with the "pathetic" here -- after all, he saw, in laughter, the rictus of disgust, and that is what is in play here), or the even more pathetic image of the man who would take the first man up on the offer --exhausts the narrow horizons left by a capitalism that systematically organizes and narrows pathos. But what Bataille sees, within fascism, is that the final act of sovereignty actually simply disguises another stage of servility, another elevation of the figures of sense.

The overcoming is to ask about the whole game of sense, or advantage. Caillois' moment consists in examining the logic of games -- ironically, in unconscious parallel with the logic of games that was going into the war effort in WWII, with Von Neumann and Turing producing the kind of cybernetics that would support an enlarged war machine. Bataille's moment consists in claiming that sovereignty and abjection exist in another realm, the realm of non-sense, that neither fascism nor capitalism (nor state capitalism) can recuperate. All, eventually, are systems that generate movies that have happy endings. It is the happy ending society that Bataille wants to overcome -- that is the point of overoming, rather than synthesizing, or dialectically opposing.

Nice post.

'Overcoming, in this way of thinking, does not operate by way of stabilizing oppositions and picking which side one is on.... The overcoming is to ask about the whole game of sense, or advantage.'
If only Bataille had been on hand in Prague when thr tanks rolled in; this information would have been gratefully received by all the people being rounded up.

Henrymiller, if you are looking for an all purpose tactic of resistance, than Bataille is not your man. Smith and Wesson is much more to be commended.

However, I think your reproach -- which seems to demand immediate practicality from any thinking about power -- should be criticized from a standpoint like Bataille's. One form of that criticism definitely animates Kundera's work -- a guy who was in Prague in 1968, when it was being invaded by a hostile occupying force, and whose fiction is energized by resistance to the demand, put by both the Communists and the Czech dissidents, to see the world divided in terms of what could and what could not be taken seriously (wonderful example of this is in the Kundera short story, The Joke).

If I am reading you correctly, you don't believe that there is any real escape from "taking a position," and thus continuing the dialectic of power that operates by casting the world into a system of categories in which opposition is the only logic. While this logic might well animate a successfuly opposition to fascism, it is good to remember that it is the same logic at work in fascism: hence the need to find the Enemy (the Jew, the communist), hence the need to negate that Enemy absolutely.

Now, it might be that the logic of power is invariant -- that any organization of power will adhere to it -- and that we have to chose, not the logic, but the defining goal. However, the logic of power does have a way of impinging on that goal -- otherwise, it would be hard to explain how the absolute opposition to fascism embodied in the capitalist democracies moved, after the destruction of fascism in Europe, to support its emplacement endlessly in peripheral third world countries from the forties until the present.

alas i've had my warning from m k-p about posting here, but thanks at least for taking the time to respond!