Critique of Heidegger*

GEORGES BATAILLE

Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos

OCTOBER 117, Summer 2006, pp. 25–34. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

(1)Appendix1

Critique of Heidegger(Critique of a philosophy of fascism)

(2)The Critique of Martin Heidegger(Critique of a Philosophy of Fascism)

— Love. the fact of chance2

the existence of one and of the otherhow the being isolated by love is nevertheless rejected,at each moment in the orbit the system of the general tear [déchirement] of being (further on, we will discuss how the various tears of being connect back to each other)

* Translated from Bataille’s original manuscript, located in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France(BNF), Georges Bataille Archive, 4.XXVI–bis. Enumeration on the left (in italics) is the standard pagi-nation by the BNF. Partial pagination on the upper right is Bataille’s, as are the cross-outs. The wordsin brackets are either illegible or have been added to the translation to improve its readability. Smalllettering to the left is my rendition of Bataille’s marginalia.1. It is not clear what text “Critique of Heidegger” was marked as an appendix to. 2. Bataille elaborates on chance in Sur Nietzsche (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); trans. On Nietzsche (NewYork: Paragon House, 1992), which was originally subtitled “Volonté de chance.” Chance is usually ren-dered here as “chance,” as Bataille is not treating “luck.”

don’ttalk aboutFreud

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— The world of homogeneity and the exit necessity of exit [sortie].Bad will stands in the way of the description of homogeneity.3

Put it off for later. The aspiration to something wholly other is stronger than the need to justify the will to flee. Nevertheless we will describe homogeneity later,once we have distinguished between intention and homogeneity.4

— The consciousness of degradation

— Effectuation of the exitWhat happens when life frees itself from degradation. Not only anxiety, but also tumult, and the impression

of being torn. The I am there: the region of the I am there where existence takes place (in the existential sense).5 This region protects from a determination or an intention. Nevertheless, this fact

(3)distinguishes itself from intention of the, because it conflicts with itself

[elle se discord] when achieving intentional form. Yet it cannot exist without intention. It The ego is thus only revealed by intention, albeit too much—and in its development, it is further revealed by the critique of the intentionality of the ego, by the support [supportation] of improbability,by a betrayal of all intentionality.6

3. For Bataille’s 1930s conception of homogeneity, see his essays in “Dossier hétérologique,” Oeuvrescomplètes II: Ecrits posthumes 1922–1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 165–202; “The PsychologicalStructure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1985); and “Fascism in France,” in Rebecca Comay, ed., “Bataille:Writings from the 1930s,” Alphabet City 4/5, pp. 50–54. See also Rodolphe Gasché, “The HeterologicalAlmanac,” in Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, ed., On Bataille: Critical Essays (Buffalo: State University of NewYork Press, 1995), pp. 157–208.4. When Bataille refers to intention, it is likely that he is thinking of Husserl’s intentionality, thoughhis discussion hardly allows us to assume a definitive or close appropriation. See Edmund Husserl,Ideen I (Husserliana III) (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976); trans. Ideas I (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982),§§84, 146; and the second of Husserl's Cartesianische Meditationen (Husserliana I) (The Hague: M.Nijhoff, 1973); trans. Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), §§12–22.5. Given that “existentiel” would be the proper spelling for an unphilosophical adjective to exis-tence, Bataille is probably referring to Heidegger’s distinction between existenziell [in English: existen-tiell] and existenzial [in English: existential], where the first points toward existence as a lived experi-ence of Being and the latter toward a philosophical delineation of existence. See Martin Heidegger,Sein und Zeit (1927; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), §4, p. 12; trans. Being and Time (New York: Harper andRow, 1962), p. 33.6. As is the case with Bataille’s texts elsewhere (notably Inner Experience), le moi cannot be exactlytranslated into English as “the ego,” or “the self.” It is important to understand that this term refers toan “I” that is as individualized as it is unformed—and that this is unique to each individual. I have thustranslated it (with all the problems carried over in this translation) as the ego, without involving in thisdescription a Freudian scheme, which would radically alter the picture. It is worth noting that le moi

Distinguishbetweenintuition and homogeneity

— Societywrite briefly, saying that it could be shown that society

is torn between authority and anarchy. Disappearance of the being of societies with democracy. . . . ? . . . Subversion. (all that is to be said on fascism and Russia must be said next.)

Being outside: what the ego exists for. Impossibility of existing for oneself—which amounts to saying: dying

(heideggerian transcendence)

Critique of societyCritique of GodPrinciple of the existence of the ego for intentionality Plane of intentionality in the world of science (indifference of the limit where science represses intention)

Science and its natural disarray matter little: there is the outside of me that the ego demands so as to live in the sense of dying.

(4)Phrases chain themselves to one another

with their feeble power.

But what is the force thatThey describe, they measure the world, but the world

passes through, like water liquid through one’s fingers.Why attempt new enchainments

to summon, one more time, the a world that escapes from itself?

Still It is as with every question to which one only respondsby a stroke of luck [chance]. I have wanted the world to escape me, I have wanted to escape from the

Critique of Heidegger 27

corresponds to Husserl’s “pure ego” unaffected by reduction, which Husserl was reluctant to turn intoan object of inquiry until his later works. See the “Fourth Meditation,” in Cartesian Meditations,§§30–41. Bataille accepts the significance of an ipse prior to reduction, but is unwilling to accept thatthis is a pure ego or transcendental consciousness pure and simple. See also Jean-Paul Sartre’s use of“the me” in “La Transcendance de l'ego,” in Recherches philosophiques 6 (1936–37), pp. 85–123; repub-lished in book form (Paris: Vrin, 1965), and trans. The Transcendence of the Ego (New York: Hill andWang, 1991).

(5)world. In the moment when I write, I breathe with all my strength, and I breathe free. Freeto love Free in the world ofsubmission, free that however demands where my submission is nevertheless required, but how can could [being] free have here any meaningother than happy?

Happiness or unhappiness? I could not beMy freedom, my strength is only chance, scandalous chance

happiness fortune that will escape me, to the extent that, as soon as its enjoyment ends, I will fear it, to the extent that I will feel I have to justify it.

(6) 1.I.

How, starting from shared habitual life when it appears as a prison—what cannot fail something that inevitably happens, at some point or other, andthe reasons for which, the conditions behind whose occurrence we do not yet need to become more clearly conscious of—how the confined spirithuman life escapes from the series from the net of ofadherences that limits its agitation under the implacable empire of misery, of mud, of the cold, and of hunger: this is what I’d like to express today, not only for the other but for me, thus not only to clarify but to burn.

From From the immediate [immédiate] life that presents itself is imposed on me first of all as money, acquired, to be acquired, or expended in proportion to measurable acts, I could not retain do not retain here more than the imprint as I can the form,

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(7) 2.which is to say the equivalence, established between things, acts, products, and signs of various things, acts, and various products.7 In This general form is where the ego that I am inscribes itself in between in species and genres as a juridical, physiological zoological or juridical or militaryequivalence. The ego is no longer anything more than a function of a given system, according tocircumstances and even only temporary inclinations,but which maintaining not guards a constant fixed character: its significance it would be of little importance meaning that, withoutthe sanction that results from the constant menace of misery, the system itself would be deprived ofall importance.

However, in the state where the void of social existence ismeant to conform to this Thus the demands and the wear of quotidian,material lifethat takes place, in effect, in the region I inhabit where I dwell today

But without ever being, they collide with the no less durable presenceof the ego the obstinacy of an ego

(8) 3.that retakes obscurely retakes

However, in the state where on principle the void of social existence is presupposed as conforming to (as takes place, in effect fact, in the region where I live), the exigencyof materal life that postulates the ego like ofa dossier equivalence, throws itself at the sly obstinacy of the profound formless ego that does not clearly know itself as such but which in obscurely senses itself to be but in—and to be threatened by death—in the disorder of an inexplicable night.

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7. See Bataille’s “La notion de dépense,” in Oeuvres complètes I: Premiers écrits 1922–1940 (Paris:Gallimard, 1968), pp. 302–20; first published in La Critique sociale 7 (1933) and translated as “TheNotion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess, pp. 116–29.

Of the From the bottom of this disorder, indefinitely, nature human life, vaguely reaching consciousness, responds toto the exigency of life material activity by its consciousness of illusion of the illusory character of all systems constructed on originating from an exigency as narrow. linked to immediate activity.Unfortunately,it seems

Self-consciousness. Even before wholly justifyinga recourse becoming wholly and clearly

(9) 4.The exit of human existence out Thus, out of the circle of

banal realities immediate things, entangled in each other, factories, ateliers, rooms, offices, laboratories, teaching classrooms, with the determined limited functions that each such place implies for each person, the exit from human existence cannot actually have takes place necessarily on the in the order of becoming self-conscious.

Insofar as It is because A lusterless [atone] employee,whether he so be or not sometimes in a clear but most often in an obscure region of his lifeconsciousness, follows, without the power of detaching himself, no longer the course of his employment and the reality arranged around himin by the sheer fact process of employment, but instead this need to be, which nothing from outside can supply, which opposes him distinguishes him

(10) 5.only scarcely more vaguely from all that is can be the world than the condemned distinguishes himself from the law that condemns him, from judges, the guillotine, of the executioners.

In the practice of life, this somber strange perspective, troubled by numerous interferences, has few chances of subsisting

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longer than a fugitive instant being translated into whatever a manifest attitude.

It is troubled Yet, efficacious or not, whether the reaction is it is out of the efficacious or fugitive reaction of the most trampled of men reduced to a function that by the most existed lusterless [atone] of men reduced to a function,that the human escape through which human destiny delivers itself from afrom enslavement incorporation in the system of work must direct itself be elaborated.

(11) 6.II.

The behavior of the man searching to deliver liberate himself from the world—from the sad sick world of work, of obligationof his work—of the world differs necessarily as a result ofcircumstances of place or time, that is to sayas a result of the structure of the society he finds himself in. That is why the present state of this structure in civilized advanced countries as a wholemust be enunciated as the premise fundamental given of all possible endeavors. It follows that this enunciation, even in a brief form that no appreciable difficulty will oppose

It is easy to see that, in general all Aristocratic or religious constructions, that granted themselves a meaning but did not respond directly to the principle of utility, are on the path to disappearing: more and more, the organized forces

(12) 7.that transform each man into a function impose themselves as the ultimate reality.

Overall, the old values are no longer tolerated except in the state of ruin and powerless play. They still encumber and even dominate the an existence that has barely been asserted, but but they tie direct themselves [se bornent] more and more to the

Critique of Heidegger 31

vague and fugitive formations of free individuals.Far from being conjured up by the single voice of

numerous peoples, God is no moreGod, as a violence surging from the single voice

of numerous peoples, God is dead andHis; he survives as nothing more than the illusory games of the ego and, the pale excrescences [excroissances] of the egothat are no more than ego. The authorityAnd if the nations presence and the reality of nations still imposes itself on the mass of those

(13) 8. who compose them, nations themselves have ceased to be theradiant signs they used to be of glory, pride, or bursting buoyancy, and have thus become before all strangely impoverished through menaces of constraint, collective catastrophe, and unhappiness: scarcely distinct from the industrial and financial enterprises that . . . they again cover over.

(14)III.

Once it has been expressed as a new historical fact, the intrusion of the ego requires that one distance oneself from leftover approximations, so as to attempt to accede to a Cartesian rigor.

(15)In intention, the ego progressively loses its ego individual character

and finds itself carried to a universal value that makes it escape from the strictly ego form of the ego. It is, nonetheless, only through intention that the formless ego becomesself-consciousness. Thus the ego is a transient fact, not only as a result of its chance birth and its approaching death, but also because the process that determines it is also the one that exhausts it. It is impossible to even reach

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Next,the attemptat a remedy: science

a clear distinction between determination and exhaustion. The determined ego is, by the sheer fact

of determination, an exhausted ego.

(16)Certainly, this is a new form a totally

other form a totally other way of being that is proposed to existence, and thus one should not be surprised that from the beginning, even out of this new fermentation that enters the world and that the world had not up to now yet imagined made possible the first accents are the mostacid that are of an almost insurmountable acidity. And of one ofthe most apparent most nauseating banal vulgarity,even more so even in the eyes of for in the eyes of those who, turn themselves away keep awaybecause they lack for want of sufficient physical force to face up, must turn themselves away.

What is happening—and it matters little whether this be in fiction or in the real course of things—what is happening, which may be flashyfascinating but also may be of no consequence, carries

(17)a sum that with it no more than a revolt against a system of intentions according to which that in turn demands with that such a revolt does not occur. It is alsoof immense interest that for vulgar practical no less banal reasons of convenience this cannot become the point of departure for any new intention, even a subversive one. Some years ago, paraphrasing Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom the title of a work by Sade,8I formed the imagined design for, undertook wantedto write, in my own turn, a long licentious novel that I called (I took full responsibility for my ostentatiousness and bad taste) Philosophy in the Shit.

Critique of Heidegger 33

8. D.A.F. de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, in Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom,and Other Writings (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990).

(18)If intentionality holds the meaning of life, this is only to the extent that it must be maintained in order to maintain the very phenomenon of life as this last has materially tied itself to the services of intentionality. Moreover, the whole question concerns the meaning of the word service: is intention the means or the end? Which does not say that, in cases where intention is still concrete it must there would be advantage, it must be assigned to just about anyservice, in fact it would be spontan is never assigned to the service of being except through the intermediary of homogeneous formations—and thus there is only a decadence of being.

(19)Every man that confounds the sentiment of

his value with hisIf a man has a sense of his

value, which he relates to another,established value, if he relates himself tothe place he occupies on one of the miserable ladders of power, then by so doing he rejects himself outside of being and places himself among those whorejects his existence in the mass of squandered existence, that is brought about in fact butonly as existence that has been produced in factbut has not attained the form where it ceases producing itself in relation to other things.

(20)How to distinguish between a being that comprehends

takes the value of an end, and intentionality.

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