> The supreme concept with which it is customary to begin a transcendental philosophy is the division into the possible and the impossible. But since all division presupposes a concept to be divided, a still higher one is required, and this is the concept of an object in general, taken problematically, without its having been decided whether it is something or nothing [K III 305–6].
> what matters is not the enunciation of the wind, but the wind [V 25].
Peter Hillmore’s rеport for the Observer [5th May 1991, p.23] bеgins:
> As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. The water is still now, almost unnaturally so as if it was resting from its monumental act of carnage, exhausted by its orgasmic tidal surge.
>
> Nothing seems to move. The water, so savage last week, now laps gently round the bodies. Half-embedded in the mud and very, very still, a child lies in the water, arms and legs stiffly outstretched, its body bloated by the heat, its face battered and bloody.
>
> Next to it lies the body of a calf, its eyes wide in final uncomprehending shock. A few yards away in the middle of the road lie the bodies of two dead fish, as if the sea had even turned on its own.
The state of Bangladesh, until 1971 East Pakistan, is nestled in the delta complex of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, and is amongst the poorest as well as the most densely populated regions of the earth. It is a country whose natural inheritance is a mixture of fertility and disaster, and whose people are exposed by their poverty to the unimpeded course of elemental forces; rendered naked before the storms. Since records began in the eighteenth century at least 1.2 million Bangladeshis have been killed by cyclones, as many as half a million in the storm of 1970 alone.
Cyclones are atmospheric machines that transform latent energy into angular momentum in a feed-back process of potentially catastrophic consequence. Their conditions of emergence are a warm water surface, a latitude of at least five or six degrees deviation from the equator (such that the Coriolis effect is operative), a pronounced instability in the air column or a low surface pressure, and the absence or virtual absence of wind shear. When these conditions coexist a cyclone can develop, over a period that normally lasts from four to eight days. A large cyclone transfers 3.5 billion tons of air an hour from the lower to upper atmosphere, and releases energy in the order of 10 25 ergs every second. At the centre of the cyclone is a still zone of low pressure known as the ‘eye’ or ‘core’ which registers no radar echo, and which functions as the immobile motor of the storm’s angular momentum or expressed energy [11].
Large cyclones have the impact of immense explosions, and when they strike the coast of Bangladesh they leave a shock-wave in the silt, throwing-up numerous evanescent islands in the shallows of the gulf of Bengal. Due to the general hunger for land, and the richness of the sediment that has been carried down to the sea, these fragile traces are enthusiastically occupied, rice is cultivated upon them, and fish harvested from their shores. It takes no great feat of imagination to envisage the fate of the peasants and fishermen clustered on these insubstantial ripples of earth when the cyclone returns, and instantaneously consumes the tenuous vestiges of previous ravages. The densely inhabited silt traces are not merely flooded, but utterly erased, as everything which had seemed solid is dissolved into the vortex of the storm. The people of the Bangladesh coast are episodically consumed by a harsh truth from which we can momentarily hide. Being a patriarchal faith, or doctrine of identity, the Islamic culture predominant in Bangladesh is no better a preparation for this liquidation than Judaism or Christianity would be. Nevertheless, an annihilation such as that of the cyclone—in which all stability is washed away and loss alone prevails—is not merely a disaster, but religion.
Of the ‘terrain of pure understanding’ Kant says:
> This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion [K III 267–8].
Is not transcendental philosophy a fear of the sea?
Something like a dike or a sea-wall? A longing for the open ocean gnaws at us, as the land is gnawed by the sea. A dark fluidity at the roots of our nature rebels against the security of terra firma, provoking a wave of anxiety in which we are submerged, until we feel ourselves drowning, with representation draining away. Nihil ulterius
Incipit Kant:
We are not amphibians, but belong upon solid earth. Let us renounce all strange voyages. The age of desire is past. The new humanity I anticipate has no use for enigmatic horizons; it knows the ocean is madness and disease. Let me still your ancient tremors, and replace them with dreams of an iron shore.
Reason in its legitimate function is a defence against the sea, which is also an inhibition of the terrestrial; retarding our tendency to waste painstakingly accumulated resources in futile expeditions, a ‘barrier opposed to the expenditure offerees’ [II 332] as Bataille describes it. It is a fortified boundary, sealing out everything uncertain, irresolvable, dissolvant, a sea-wall against the unknown, against death. This is a structure continuous with the great land reclamation projects of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: a matter of drainage, rigorous separation of the wet and the dry, eradication of marshes and ambiguous terrains, rigidification of the soil (‘the mosquitos and other stinging insects that make the wilds of America so trying for the savages, may be so many goads to urge these primitive men to drain the marshes and bring light into the dense forests that shut out the air, and, by so doing, as well as by the tillage of the soil, to render their abodes more sanitary’ [K X 328]). Such terrestrialism reaches its zenith in Prussia’s classic age; in the restriction of policy to continental ambitions. It is thus characterized by a certain hardness; a certain deliberate blindness towards death, as towards everything that flows freely like a wound.
Unlike either Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, who in different ways seek to place themselves outside the ambit of an Occidental history dominated by the monotheistic order of the supreme object, and to connect with the east Asiatic zero that contests it, Bataille seems to resign himself to a struggle without refuge against the One. Far more even than Nietzsche, Bataille thinks of zero as a subtraction from One—as the death of God—and approaches it in anguish. In this way he aligns himself with a procedure of immense influence upon the course of European modernity, that of a progressive problematization from unity, harmonized with the dissolution of sedentary community. The most powerful example of such thinking is to be found in the cultural heartland of capital, which is to say, in the critical philosophy initiated by Kant.
***
Bataille ‘interrupts’ [V 29] Inner Experience in order to make a few pages of remarks about Hinduism, in a section which ends with a technical argument designed to reinforce his claim to be no more interested in liberation from rebirth than in any other type of salvation. He compares the asceticism of Hinduism to that of Christianity, distancing himself from both in the name of excess, and pretends to no affinity with ‘the naïvety— the purity—of the Hindu’ [V 30]. Perhaps most important of all is the affirmation of mess and inadequacy implicit in the words: ‘I do not doubt that the Hindus go far into the impossible, but to the highest degree they lack that which matters to me; the faculty of expression’ [V 31]. It is because he is a writer that Bataille disdains to be a mystic. In what he understands of the Hindu religion—and he lays claim to no intimate knowledge of it—there is one tenet alone to which he unconditionally subscribes: ‘[o]nly intensity matters’ [V 29].
Inner experience translates mysticism into a vagrant vocabulary at the scurf-edge of tradition. As the initial gesture of a Summa Atheologica, it begins amongst the ruins of God.. Echoing Celine - that other wretched tramp of nihilism — he calls experience ‘a voyage to the end of the possible of man’ [V 19], and thinks interiority not as the secret recess of the self, but as a plane of contact and contagion. The core of inner experience is not personal identity, but naked intensity, denuded even of oneself, and jutting from the refuse of Christian dogmatics as a broken lurch into the unknown. He insists: ‘inner experience is ecstasy’ whilst ‘ecstasy is . . . communication, opposing itself to the subsidence onto oneself’ [V 24],
It is the order of the object that organizes inner experience as private reverie, and as a detachment from relation. Above all it is the God of monotheism - the supreme or absolute being — which reproduces the prison of individuation at the scale of the cosmos. This is why the ecstasy of the unknown, which gnaws away the last landmarks from Bataille’s voyage, contests any possible resurrec- tion of theological edifices. As he remarks:
I hold the apprehension of God, even when formless and without mode ... for an arrest of the movement which carries us to the more obscure apprehension of the unknown ... [V 17].
An utter intoxication such as this is quite different from its Kantian anticipation, although Kant too contests the right of dogmatic theology to guide his journey:
Nothing but the sobriety of a critique, at once strict and just, can free us from this dogmatic delusion, which through the lure of an imagined felicity keeps so many in bondage to theories and systems. Such a critique confines all our speculative claims rigidly to the field of possible experience; and it does this not by shallow scoffing at ever-repeated failures or pious sighs over the limits of our reason, but by an effective determining of these limits in accordance with established principles, inscribing nihil ulterius on those Pillars of Hercules which nature herself has erected in order that the voyage of our reason may be extended no further than the continuous coastline of experience itself reaches - a coast we cannot leave without venturing upon a shoreless ocean which, after alluring us with ever-deceptive prospects, compels us in the end to abandon as hopeless all this vexatious and tedious endeavour [K IV 392-3].
For Kant it is not enough to have reached the ocean, the shoreless expanse, the nihil ulterius as positive zero. He recognizes the ocean as a space of absolute voyage, and thus of hopelessness and waste. Only another shore would redeem it for him, and that is nowhere to be found. Better to remain on dry land than to lose oneself in the desolation of zero. It is for this reason that he says the ‘concept of a noumenon is ... a merely limiting concept ’ [K IV 282]. In this way the Occidental obsession with the object consum- mates itself in the blind passivity of its nihilism. Beyond experience, it is suggested, there must be thought ‘an unknown something’ [K III 283], although ‘we are unable to comprehend how such noumena can be possible’ [K III 281], More precisely:
[The noumenon] ... is not indeed in any way positive, and is
not a determinate knowledge of anything, but signifies only the
thought of something in general, in which I abstract from
everything that belongs to the form of sensible intuition [K III
281],
That no transcendent object is found is an event which retains the
sense of a lost or absent object, rather than that of a contact with
or through objectlessness. The ocean has no sense except as a
failure of the land. Even whilst supposedly knowing nothing of the
noumenon, which, we are told, has ‘no assignable meaning’ [K III
303], one somehow still knows that it would be something other
than objectless waste without end, or the void-plane touched upon
at zero-intensity. Kant is peculiarly adamant in this respect:
[W]e cannot think of any way in which such intelligible objects might be given. The problematic thought which leaves open a place for them serves only, like an empty space, for the limitation of empirical principles, without itself containing or revealing any other object of knowledge beyond the sphere of those principles [K III 285],
The noumenon is the absence of the subject, and is thus
inaccessible in principle to experience. If there is still a so-called
‘noumenal subject’ in the opening phase of the critical enterprise it
is only because a residue of theological reasoning conceives a
stratum of the self which is invulnerable to transition, or
synonymous with time as such. This is the ‘real’ or ‘deep’ subject,
the self or soul, a subject that sloughs-off its empirical instantiation
without impairment, the immortal subject of mortality. It only
remains for Hegel to rigorously identify this subject with death,
with the death necessitated by the allergy of Geist to its finitude, to
attain a conception of death for itself. But this is all still the absence
of the subject, even when ‘of’ is translated into the subjective
genitive, and at zero none of it makes any difference.
With Kant death finds its theoretical formulation and utilitarian
frame as a quasi-objectivity correlative to capital, and noumenon is its name. The effective flotation of this term in philosophy
coincided with the emergence of a social order built upon a
profound rationalization of excess, or rigorous circumscription of
voluptuous lethality. Once enlightenment rationalism begins its
dominion ever fewer corpses are left hanging around in public
places with each passing year, ever fewer skulls are used as paper-
weights, and ever fewer paupers perish undisturbed on the streets.
Even the graveyards are rationalized and tidied up. It is not
surprising, therefore, that with Kant thanatology undergoes the
most massive reconstruction in its history. The clerical vultures are
purged, or marginalized. Death is no longer to be culturally
circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and
ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is
privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the
contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation.
Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of
stock.
In the Analytic of the Sublime in his Third Critique Kant
tentatively raises the possibility that we might taste death - even if
only through a ‘negative pleasure’ — but nowhere does he raise the
possibility that death might savage us. Even when positivized as
noumenon, death remains locked in the chain of connotations that
passes through matter, inertia, femininity, and castration, resting
in its pacified theistic sense as toothless resource and malleable
clay. There is no place, no domain, for base matter in Kant’s
thinking, since even auto-generativity in nature is conceived as a
regulative analogue of rational willing. One must first unleash the
noumenon from its determination as problematic object in order to
glimpse that between matter and death there is both a certain
identity and an intricate relation, or, in other words: a unilateral
difference appending matter to the edge of zero. Not that this
complicity has anything to do with the inertia crucial to the
mathematical idealization of matter, or with any other kind of
mechanical sterility. Matter is no more simply dead than it is simply
anything else, because simplicity is the operator of the transcen-
dent disjunction between subject and object which effaces base
materiality. The death ‘proper’ to matter is the jagged edge of its
impropriety, its teeth.
If death can bite it is not because it retains some fragment of a
potency supposedly proper to the object, but because it remains uncaged by the inhibition objectivity entails. Death alone is utterly
on the loose, howling as the dark motor of storms and epidemics.
After the ruthless abstraction of all life the blank savagery of real
time remains, for it is the reality of abstraction itself that is time:
the desert, death, and desolator of all things. Bataille writes of ‘the
ceaseless slippage of everything into nothing. If one wants, time’
[V 137], and thinks of himself as ‘a tooth of TIME’ [I 558]. It
could also be said - in a more Nietzschean vein - that zero-
becoming has its metaphor in a bird of prey, for which every object
is a lamb.
Repression always fails, but nowhere is there a more florid example of such failure than the attempt to bury death quietly on the outskirts of the city and get down to business. Only the encrusted historical superficies of zero are trapped in the clay, distilling death down to its ultimate liquidity, and maximizing its powers of infiltration. Marx notes this filtration process in Capital, where he remarks about money/death that it ‘does not vanish on dropping out of the circuit of the metamorphosis of a given commodity. It is constantly being precipitated into new places in the arena of circulation vacated by other commodities’ [Cap 114]. Dead labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule.
*
Politics is the archaic and inadequate name for something that
must pass away into the religious history of capital. There are no
effective anti-capitalist interests, but only anti-bourgeois desires in
alliance with zero. The notorious asceticism of accumulative
Protestantism already prefigures the suicide of the last ruling class,
anticipating the definitive surrender of all humanity to death.
Marx says in the Grundrisse:
The cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-
sacrifice - economy and frugality, contempt for mundane,
temporal and fleeting pleasures; the chase after the eternal
treasure. Hence the connection between English puritanism, or
also Dutch protestantism, and money making [Gr 232],
Weber remarks: ‘this asceticism turned with all its force against
one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer’ [PES 166]. This is the initial impulse into capital’s religious
history; the sacrifice of all dogmatic theology to the ascetic ideal,
which is finally consummated in the death of God. The theology of
the One, rooted in concrete beliefs and codes that summarize and
defend the vital interests of a community, and therefore affiliated to
a tenacious anthropomorphism, is gradually corroded down to the
impersonal zero of catastrophic religion. In its early stages capital
is still a matter of self-control, but after a couple of centuries its
rigid ethos withers away, because there is no effective self left to
resist it. To quote Weber again:
Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas [PES 53].
and:
The capitalistic economy of the present day [1904-5!] is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job [PES 55].
Once the commodity system is established there is no longer a need
for an autonomous cultural impetus into the order of the abstract
object. Capital attains its own ‘angular momentum’, perpetuating
a run-away whirlwind of dissolution, whose hub is the virtual zero
of impersonal metropolitan accumulation. At the peak of its
productive prowess the human animal is hurled into a new
nakedness, as everything stable is progressively liquidated in the
storm.
Bataille associates the unknown with ‘a vertiginous movement towards the void’ [V 94] which he also describes as ‘the rending fall into the void of the heavens’ [V 93], collapsing two themes into each other which Kant had strained to keep apart, those of noumenon and intensive zero. It is frequently suggested in the writings of the immediately post-Kantian generation that Kant illegitimately differentiates noumena from each other, and Bataille shares a broadly Schopenhauerian impetus in his response to this issue, but it is not until Nietzsche that the differentiation between noumenon and zero is vigorously interrogated, and even then this is only undertaken in a sporadic and elliptical fashion. It is first of all Bataille, and later Deleuze, who respond to this matter with irresistible tenacity, and thus undercut the phenomenological stumblings that have been the more common retort to the Kantian challenge.
Where Kant resists the conflation of noumenon from zero-
intensity, Bataille runs them convulsively into each other. All his
writings - irrespective of whether they are marked by a
predominantly literary or philosophical character - are cut-up by
oblivion, discontinuity, and incompletion. Zero alone cannot be
fragmented, divided, or partitioned — being undifferentiability
without unity - but the expense of this continuity for discrete being
is without limit:
We are not totally denuded except in going without fraudulence to the unknown. It is the part of the unknown which gives to the experience of God — or of poetry — their great authority. But the unknown demands in the end an empire without division [V 17].
*
In the First Critique Kant differentiates between four divisions of
nothing, reciprocally correlated to the four classes of the categories.
These are the ens rationis or empty concept without object, the nihil
privativum or empty object of a concept, the ens imaginarium or empty
intuition without object, and the nihil negativum or empty object
without concept [K III 306-7]. It is the first of these nothingnesses
which applies to the noumenon, as Kant writes:
To the concepts of all, many, and one there is opposed the
concept which cancels everything, that is, none. Thus the object
of a concept to which no assignable intuition whatsoever
corresponds is = nothing. That is, it is a concept without an
object (ens rationis), like noumena, which cannot be reckoned among the possibilities, although they must not for that reason be declared to be also impossible ... [K III 306].
Kant makes the indifferentiating gesture ‘= nothing’ in relation to
the noumenon, but only amongst a systematic obliteration of
illimitable zero; crushing it under the categories of the object which
— according to their four classes - stamp it with inverse features of
mathematical unity, semantic definition, substantial reciprocity,
and logical identity. It is crucial to the historical force of Bataille’s
thought of sacrifice that it contests both the general tendency of
this Kantian articulation and each of its particular elements.
Rather than sharing the features of subtraction, deprivation,
impotence, and dialectic, which Kant allots to the four aspects of
nothing, sacrifice characterizes zero as undifferentiably pre-unitary,
extravagant, unilateral, and impossible.
The noumenon is not primarily an epistemological problem, but a religious one. Bataille writes that ‘a sort of rupture - in anguish - leaves us at the limit of tears: thus we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an ungraspable beyond’ [V 23], When he adds that ‘the sole truth of man, finally glimpsed, is to be a supplication without response’ [V 25], it is not being suggested that a reference to alterity is inherent to experience in a phenomenological fashion, but rather, that experience is immanent to the trajectory of loss or sacrifice, in terms of which it is a real modification or limitation. The relation of the known to the unknown is unilateral not reciprocal, following the pattern of the difference between restricted and general economy. Zero is exploded into general economy, in which ‘[d]eath is in a sense a deception’ [V 83] because there is no privacy at zero, only the undifferentiable cosmic desert, impersonal silence, a landscape touched upon only in the deepest abysses of inhuman affect. ‘Despair is simple’ Bataille writes, ‘it is the absence of all hope, of every lure. It is the state of desolate expanses and - I can imagine - of the sun’ [V 51]. This is the terrain of immanence or the unknown; positive death as zero-intensity, unilaterally differen- tiated from ecstasy or naked sensation. It is the whole ramshackle complex associated with the taste of death in Bataille’s writings, leading him to remark in Inner Experience, for instance: ‘I remain in intolerable unknowing, which has no issue other than ecstasy itself’ [V 25], deft materialist gesture, indicating that transcendent dogma does not lie in the positing of an outside to experience, but rather, in the positing of experience as dissociated from its slide into oblivion. Experience can never comprehend or define dissolvant immanence, and the claim that it might can be symptomatologically interpreted as the consequence of a utilitarian reconstruction into objectivity. It is thus that Bataille reiterates Nietzsche’s diagnosis concerning the moral basis of epistemology. The very possibility of a problem about the relation between experience and the real - requiring a theory of representation — presupposes the deformation of ex- perience in terms of the ‘good’, or, in other words, the stable, isolated, and determinate, correlated to the caging of noumenon in the form of the object. In wild variance to the basic presupposition of overt or cunning idealism, experience is not given in reality as knowledge, but as collapse.
Just as Kant domesticates the noumenon by defining it as an object, so he domesticates zero-intensity by conceiving it as pure consciousness. The vestigial traces of the subject/object relation - i.e. of epistemology - constrain the movement of inner experience by substantializing a pole of knowing and a pole known, even at ‘pure intuition = 0’ [K III 208-9]. It is to refuse such constraint that Bataille insists that: ‘experience finishes by attaining the fusion of subject and object, being unknowing subject, like unknown object’ [V 21], and remarks of ‘oneself’ that ‘this is not the subject isolated from the world, but a place of communication, fusion of subject and object’ [V 21]. In this shift from the transcendental idealist treatment of zero to that of base material- ism there is a difference of seismic consequence. The discussion of zero-intensity in Kant’s Schematism, for instance, is securely framed by an immunized inner-sense, and characterized by the idealistic structures of representation and reversibility:
Now every sensation has a degree or magnitude whereby, in respect of its representation of an object otherwise remaining the same, it can fill out one and the same time, that is, occupy inner sense more or less completely, down to its cessation in nothingness (= 0 = negatio). There therefore exists a relation and connection between reality and negation, or rather a transition from the one to the other, which makes every reality represent- able as a quantum. The schema of a reality, as the quantity of something insofar as it fills time, is just this continuous and uniform production of that reality in time as we successively descend from a sensation which has a certain degree to its vanishing point, or progressively ascend from its negation to some magnitude of it [K III 191].
This is a particularly extreme passage, much of which he will later
qualify, accepting that ‘sensation is not in itself an objective
representation’ [K III 208], for instance, and also massively
problematizing the possibility of empty intuitions. Nevertheless,
despite all such subtilizations, Kant never swerves from his
stubborn insistence upon thinking zero in terms of the privacy of
the individuated subject. This humanist usage of the nihil privativum
is nowhere illustrated more starkly than in the words:
from empirical consciousness to pure consciousness a graduated
transition is possible, the real in the former completely vanishing
and a merely formal a priori consciousness of the manifold in
space and time remaining [K III 208],
Purity is, of course, a motif of almost inestimable importance throughout the entirety of Kant’s critical writings. Of its many functions there is one that can be glimpsed with particularly sharp definition in this passage, which is that of the subjectification of abstraction, or the sublimation of death into a power of the subject. The extinction of the subject is floated speculatively as a representational schema, through which thought seizes an autonomy for itself over against the passivity of sensation. Kant does not deny that pure consciousness is oblivion, death, or the subject in itself - which is to say that it is nothing (= 0) - he simply evades the issue, implicitly consigning it to the imagination.
Purity is a negation to the second power, through which death de-realizes even itself. Thinking these negations bilaterally leads to a transcendental idealism and an immaculate morality, whilst echoing them unilaterally leads to a base materialism and a diseased religion. On the one hand the tendency to autonomy is soberly reinforced, on the other it is deliriously ruined. Death is either paralysed by God or drowned in matter.
Kant is no less aware than Bataille that at issue there is a
question of continuous flow. In the Anticipations of Perception he
notes that:
The property of magnitudes by which no part of them is the
smallest possible, that is, by which no part is simple, is called heir continuity . . . Such magnitudes may be called flowing, since
the synthesis of productive imagination involved in their
production is a progression in time, and the continuity of time is
ordinarily designated by the term flowing or flowing away [K III 211].
In the end it is the domesticated character of the Kantian notion of time which forestalls the lurch of this thought to a base materialist conclusion. Purity conditions the a priori, which hypostasizes time as such, which in turn idealizes intensity. Flow as such is thus fixed as an eternal form of representation, frozen in an endless descent to zero. It is for this reason that Kant has an entirely ahistorical comprehension of intensity, failing to grasp the positive order of its repression: the inhibition of flow (continuity). In other words: he does not raise a problem of the object with sufficient radicality to escape from the cage of epistemology in the direction of a libidinal or base materialism. He does not acknowledge that between the noumenon and zero intensity there is no difference, or that neither are susceptible to isolation. Above all, he nowhere seems to suspect the obvious fact that zero is the primary repressed of monotheistic cultures, so that its intensive impact is historically saturated. Bataille digs demolitionally into the fault-lines of all these evasions in a single comment: ‘the extreme is at the end, is nowhere except at the end, like death’ [V 57].
*
Bataille’s break with Kantian humanism is characterized by a
ruthless exactness, as it moves sure-footedly from one fissure of
disintegration to another. Continuum is wrested definitively from
humanist containment, the order of the object is contested with a
profundity at the scale of zero, and interiority is denuded to the
point of impersonal intensity. In Method of Meditation he replies to
critics of Inner Experience :
I understand by continuum a continuous medium which is the
human collectivity, opposing itself to a rudimentary representa-
tion of indivisible and decidedly separated individuals.
The critiques that have been made of Inner Experience which
give to ‘torment’ an exclusively individual sense reveal the limit,
in relation to continuum, of the individuals which have made
them. That there exists a point of continuum where the test of
‘torment’ is inevitable, is not merely incapable of being denied, this point, situated at the extreme, defines the human being (the
continuum) [V 195].
The human animal is the one through which terrestrial excess is haemorrhaged to zero, the animal destined to obliterate itself in history, and sacrifice its nature utterly to the solar storm. Capital breaks us down and reconstructs us, with increasing frequency, as it pursues its energetic fluctuation towards annihilation, driven to the liberation of the sun, whilst the object hurtles into the vaporization of proto-schizophrenic commodification. By tapping into the deep flows of history Bataille ensures that intensity is no longer thought of as anticipated perception, but as the ecstasy of the death of God, delirial dissolution of the One:
Above all no more object. Ecstasy is not love: love is possession to which the object is necessary, at once possessor of the subject, and possessed by it. There is no longer subject = object, but a ‘gaping breach’ between one and the other and, in the breach, the subject, the object are dissolved, there is passage, com- munication, but not from the one to the other, the one and the other have lost distinct existence [V 74].
Desire responds to the cosmic madness pulsed out of the sun, and slides beyond love towards utter communication. This is a final break with Christendom, the disconnection of base flow from the terminal sentimentalism of Western man, nihilism as nakedness before the cyclone. Libido no longer as the energy of love, but as a raw energy that loves only as an accident of impersonal passion. Communion through the storm, no longer through resentment at it. At the level of the secondary process a trickle of relief supplies expresses the actual parsimony of the West in its relation to Bangladesh, but at the stratum of primary desire the West is exacerbated in its virtual generosity; in its cyclone passion (which is not merely a passion for the cyclone).
Man differs from animal in that he is able to experience certain sensations that wound and melt him to the core. These sensations vary in keeping with the individual and with his specific way of living. But, for example, the sight of blood, the odour of vomit, which arouse in us the dread of death, sometimes introduce us into a kind of nauseous state which hurts more cruelly than pain. Those sensations associated with the supreme giving-way, the final collapse, are unbearable. Are there not some persons who claim to prefer death to touching an even completely harmless snake? There seems to exist a domain where death signifies not only decrease and disappearance, but the unbearable process by which we disappear despite ourselves and everything we can do, even though, at all costs, we must not disappear. It is precisely this despite ourselves, this at all costs, which distinguish the moment of extreme joy and of indescribable but miraculous ecstasy. If there is nothing that surpasses our powers and our understanding, if we do not acknowledge something greater than ourselves, greater than we are despite ourselves, something which at all costs must not be, then we do not reach the insensate moment towards which we strive with all that is in our power and which at the same time we exert all our power to stave off [III 11].
