The sovereign without domain : Georges Bataille and the ethics of nothing

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    Abstract

    Despite all of the things that might be said to set them apart, including their explicit political commitments, a scattered but consistent critical tradition seeks to associate the work of Georges Bataille with that of Carl Schmitt (for example: Habermas 1990; Jay 1993; Wolin 1996, 2004; Levi 2007). Inasmuch as they both wrote about the sovereign, the argument goes, and associated that figure with a mysterious, quasi-sacred groundlessness or 'nothingness', Bataille and Schmitt formed part of an intellectual milieu or environment that, during the multiple crises of the inter-war period, renounced the project of the Enlightenment, and the achievements of discursive rationality, thus clearing space for and lending credence to the worst excesses of political irrationalism. If the former was a proponent of radical transgression, interested above all else in freedom, and the latter a strict authoritarian, concerned with the establishment and the preservation of political order, this difference, it is believed, only exposes the contradiction inherent to the attack on reason that characterized their age, the reverberations of which continue to shake our own. Thus, according to a logic that is nearly inescapable, not only their similarities hold Bataille and Schmitt together, their differences do as well - as though the only thing placing them in greater proximity to one another than their agreements were their disagreements, or the points at which they effectively diverge. The first and most obvious purpose of this paper is to take issue with this interpretation of Bataille and Schmitt, and to insist that the differences between these two figures are significant and profound. I argue that, while Bataille's sovereign transgression can only exist within an instant, and can only be sovereign insofar as it remains indifferent to all future purposes or goals, Schmitt's sovereign exception is never so absolute, but motivated from the outset by a return to order, and by a reinvention of the law that it breaks (cf. Geroulanos 2010: 194). For the same reason, and along the same lines, only Bataille endeavours to understand nothingness, or the negativity of the sovereign experience, outside of all relation to positivity, and outside of every dialectic that would afford the sovereign experience a communicable meaning or sense. For Schmitt, on the other hand, the entire logic of the sovereign, and everything that might be understood as an exceptional state, is circumscribed by the problem of political and legal order. To be sure, the exception exceeds the order, but always with the aim of recreating it. And it is justified, albeit retroactively, only insofar as it is able to do so. Of course, the aforementioned effort to associate Bataille with Schmitt is not merely concerned with textual exegesis. It forms part of a larger attempt to diagnose, and prevent the return of, the political catastrophes of the Twentieth Century. On this line of thought, totalitarianism in general, and fascism in particular, followed from a collapse of civil society, and all of the associations and institutions that come in between the state and the people. Without the mediating influence of civil society, the argument goes, totalitarian political movements were able to combine the boundless enthusiasm of the anomie masses, on the one hand, and the charismatic, personal leadership of a single authority, on the other. They operated by fusing, as it were, the master and the mob. In the absence of public spheres or spaces where individuals could engage in rational deliberation oriented towards consensus, political action was transformed into a terrifying amalgamation of popular fervour and executitve fiat - a combination, as some would have it, of Bataille and Schmitt.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Politics of Nothing: on Sovereignty
    EditorsClare Monagle, Dimitris Vardoulakis
    Place of PublicationU.K.
    PublisherRoutledge
    Pages37-50
    Number of pages13
    ISBN (Print)9780415509381
    Publication statusPublished - 2012

    Keywords

    • sovereignty
    • Bataille, Georges, 1897-1962
    • Schmitt, Carl, 1888-1985

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