Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a French philosopher, novelist, and essayist whose reading of Nietzsche — and whose conception of sovereignty, expenditure, and the sacred — formed the milieu from which Pierre Klossowski's *Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle* emerged. In the 1930s Klossowski participated with Bataille in the Collège de Sociologie and the journal Acéphale; the two maintained a lifelong friendship, and Bataille's influence is the formative one behind Klossowski's Nietzsche. In the book, Bataille appears as "the intimidating genius" who, in Inner Experience and On Nietzsche, emphasized Nietzsche's "ignorance" of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic — the point on which Klossowski builds his claim that Nietzsche has "no need for reciprocity."

Key Points

  • The Acéphale / Collège de Sociologie circle (1930s): Bataille, Klossowski, Leiris, Caillois; the 1937 Acéphale issue "Nietzsche and the Fascists" (against the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche) is part of Klossowski's apprenticeship.
  • Nietzsche's "ignorance" of the dialectic: Klossowski credits Bataille (in Inner Experience, On Nietzsche) with emphasizing that Nietzsche "attack[s] the Hegelian dialectic at its roots" out of an ignorance of the master–slave passage — and that this "ignorance" is the condition of Nietzschean sovereignty (the "sovereignty of an incommunicable emotion," with "no need for reciprocity").
  • Sovereignty as incommunicable emotion: Klossowski's reading of Nietzschean sovereignty against Hegel/Kojève — "Sovereignty lies in the arbitrary manner by which one feels existence" — is the Bataillean inheritance most visible in the book.

Details

The contrast with Kojève's Hegel

In Chapter 1, Klossowski follows Kojève's reading of the Phenomenology's master–slave dialectic "in broad outlines," but then turns it against Hegel via Bataille: where Kojève's Hegel makes the slave the master of culture (autonomy won through labour and recognition), Nietzsche refuses the demand for reciprocity altogether. "In Nietzsche, there is no such need for reciprocity (this is his 'ignorance' of this passage of the Dialectic)... the very idea of a 'consciousness for itself mediated by another consciousness' remains foreign to Nietzsche." Bataille is named in the footnote as the one who "emphasized this ignorance in the Genealogy of Morals."

Place in the wiki

Bataille is, for now, a referenced entity rather than a primary source: the wiki has Klossowski's book but not Bataille's own (Inner Experience, On Nietzsche, The Accursed Share). The "sovereignty / expenditure / the sacred" complex and the relation to Deleuze's and Foucault's Nietzscheanism would deepen considerably with a Bataille ingest. (The biographical and bibliographic detail beyond what the Klossowski volume states is from general knowledge and marked for verification.)

Connections

Open Questions

  • Without a Bataille source in the corpus, the wiki cannot yet distinguish Bataille's own Nietzsche from Klossowski's use of it. A primary ingest (On Nietzsche or Inner Experience) is the obvious next step.
  • How does Bataille's "sovereignty" relate to Klossowski's test-states and to the "expenditure" theme in the selective doctrine (the "useless expenditure" of affectivity)? Plausibly close; needs the source.

Sources

  • klossowski-1969-nietzsche-vicious-circle — Ch. 1 (Bataille as the source of the "ignorance"-of-the-dialectic reading; sovereignty as incommunicable emotion; the Acéphale / Collège de Sociologie context in the Translator's Preface)