To the question of “what exists?” in the event of the me that dies, Georges Bataille, in lieu of a straight answer, responds with a riddle: “time is only an empty absurdity.”1placeholder
The obscure statement is in keeping with what Bataille believes is the only viable way to discourse on this perennial subject of philosophy. Time is “not the synthesis of being and nothingness,” Bataille argues, apparently taking an aim at the Hegel model. Whereas Hegel conceives being and nothing as fundamentally absence of determination and content – such that, in Hegel’s words, they are the “same” and yet, paradoxically, “are not undistinguished from each other”2placeholder – Bataille maintains that such a distinction conflicts with the primacy of time as the site wherein being and nothingness are implicit. At this point, the argument runs up against a dilemma: the affirmation of time’s existence. To affirm the existence of time is to make an “empty assertion,” according to Bataille, which “gives less the vague attribute of existence to time than the nature of time to existence.”3placeholder
How can we grasp the nature of time, then, without alluding to its perceived existence? What are the main hurdles in the formal theorisation of time?
For Bataille, any attempt to define or establish a context of time severs the notion from its essence, its semblance of real time. “The existence of time does not even require the objective position of time as such…,” Bataille notes, since real time means the “flight and the collapse of any object that understanding sought to give itself both as a value and as a fixed object.” A projection of real time into an objective region would produce what Bataille describes as an “ecstatic vision” of a “catastrophe destroying that which founds this region.”4placeholder
The “I” that dwells in time, from whom time is bestowed its perceived presence and legitimacy, and whose condition of being is measured by spatial as well as temporal terms – this “I” is also lost in the catastrophe, not as a consequence of the destruction of the objective region, but, conversely, “the existence of things is impoverished in comparison with that of the me,” Bataille writes.5placeholder Since the existence of things only assumes value for me – in other words the thinghood is bound up with the totality of the I – and insofar as the notion of time is essentially future-oriented, unable to extract itself from the linearity and be posed in “ecstasy”, every lived moment entails, Bataille continues, “preparations for execution,” one that cannot “enclose the death it brings,” for to do so suggests that death is not a definitive end but an end point enclosed in life – and is indeed part of the continuum; the execution is “itself projected into this death, which encloses it.”6placeholder
According to Bataille’s biographer Michel Surya, Bataille had this quality of “not preferring essence to existence, of not speaking of human nature, but of its condition.”7placeholder This drift from the formalist dialectic rendered the problem of time incidental to Bataille’s overall thoughts. Bataille did not like time, Surya claims, “either historical time or political time.”8placeholder The model that best expressed his principal tenets was time retaining its concrete temporality, a palpable time consisting of nothing other than the ephemeral and irrecoverable “nowness” – “suspended time,” as Surya terms it, that operates “without calculation, without project, without end and without salvation of any sort.”9placeholder The very idea of prospect bastardises real time into something estranged from the sum of lived reality.
Philosophers in the past had emphasised time’s inextricable link to human consciousness. Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, conceives History as a “conscious, self-mediating” process of Spirit (Geist) in Time.10placeholder Time only exists to the extent that there is History; without Spirit there is only Space, which, according to Hegel, is “thought of as able to be without time.”11placeholder Given that Time does not exist outside of Spirit, Time is Spirit and Spirit is Time. From this it can be concluded that real time, for Hegel, is historical time, or, as Alexandre Kojève interprets it in his book, the “universal History,” that is “in the final analysis the history of philosophy.”12placeholder
In a footnote, Kojève elaborates on his semi-utopian reading of Hegel. The end of History, if such scenario should occur, would not be so much a “cosmic catastrophe” as simply the end of human Time or History, the “cessation of Action in the full sense of the term.” What this implies, in the possible upshot, would be “the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions,” as well as the disappearance of philosophy, which signifies the affirmation of Spirit, the attaining of complete self-knowing. In Kojève’s formulation, the sovereign state is commensurate with post-historical animality, wherein values such as “art, love, play, etc., etc.; in short, everything that makes Man happy” survive from the apocalypse and abound.13placeholder
In his essay on painter Édouard Manet, Bataille entertains a similar vision on the trajectory of Western Art:
“There came a day, however, when this vast didactic structure – erected and renewed time and again in the form of castles, churches, palaces and works of art calculated to awe the masses and bend them beneath the yoke of authority lost its power to sway. It fell to pieces, its message was shown up as mere grandiloquence, and the once obedient masses turned away in search of something else.”14placeholder
The future of Western art can avoid devolving into a cycle of homogeneity, just as human history itself remains capable of perpetual renewal from ruptures and transitions. Bataille echoes Kojève’s conception of complete self-knowing – which Bataille prefers the term “sovereignty” – as coinciding with the collapse of history. The pursuit of sovereignty necessitates a revolt against morality and reason, against human life’s thralldom to the imperative of work, and ultimately against the very quality of being human. Sovereignty calls for a “super-human”, whose essence, however, consists in its own dissolution as a theoretical concept. To be a super-human is to pledge to the impossible – the proof of which is invariably in the silence of the renounced – and to submit to the headiness of present time, without, says Bataille, “having anything in view but this present time.”15placeholder
The ”time” that we live in – one that stretches from the immemorial past to the unknown future – barely allows the dictation of present time: it is a familiar conundrum, that whatever is happening now is already, by the time that it happens, a thing of the past. It may then be inferred that human time belongs to the realm of the possible, that it stands in contrast to sovereignty, hinging on a moral order that favours work and taboo, the two pillars of future stability. The dream of a timeless, ahistorical world reveals a central tension in Bataille’s philosophy: that the notion, in its attempt to approximate a non-notion, succeeds only in re-confirming its irremediable status as a notion. Alternatively, this unresolved paradox is key to getting closer to the truth of sovereignty, despite never fully penetrating its essence. Bataille conceded to a profanised sovereignty, which finds manifestation in someone who is “essentially the embodiment of the one he is (the real sovereign man) but is not.” In other words, a sovereign man is “the same as the one he replaces; the one who replaces him is the same as he.”16placeholder
As with sovereignty, the notion of time in Bataille’s thought is primarily twofold: one that arrests the passage to anchor on a single instant, and one that endeavours to suspend itself amidst the inevitable flow. Such a contrast is at the heart of Roger Caillois’s Man and the Sacred (1939), a seminal ethnographical study that provided a conceptual scaffold for Bataille’s later inquiries on taboo and sovereignty. In it, Caillois divides the time of human existence into profane time and sacred time: the time we devote to useful, productive work – work that reduces our autonomy to a condition of thinghood – is profane time, whilst sacred time is reserved for the destruction of everything that profane time promotes. In an ideal scenario, the sacred time would transcend the delimited time itself and enter the region of time-lessness.
What remained mere subtext in Caillois’s account of sacred time became the focal point for Bataille. Rooted in the conflict between idea and materiality, Bataille’s philosophy strives toward the radical, unfulfilled objective of a subjectivity stripped of its ipse – a disruptive force that negates the very intent to destroy. It then follows that sacred time cannot establish a legitimised basis unless it is mediated – given that an outward authority is banished – through an internal process. In his notes to Inner Experience (1943), Bataille hints at the possible form such an internal process might take: “…immanence – whose concept is the destruction of the concept – is outside of time: in that it is time.” And further: “Immanence is the moment – insofar as it is withdrawn from the project and flowing in time…”17placeholder In theory, immanence, which in Bataille’s writing is often synonymous with sovereignty, posits a modality that is neither the means nor the end of a pursuit or an enterprise. An immanent matter, being transcendent of homogeneous elements, is closed to us insofar as, Bataille writes in On Nietzsche (1945), it signifies the “negation of nothingness” (such that one “cannot draw the immanence of the object from this negation”).18placeholder
A possible access might still be obtained: “The world of immanence is as antithetical to the real world as immoderation is to moderation, madness to reason, drunkenness to lucidity,” Bataille says in the first volume of The Accursed Share (1949).19placeholder Teetering on the brink of reason and consciousness, immoderation carves out a negative space wherein the subject is divested of the thinghood that the world of work and moderation otherwise demands of the living, collapsing the distance between the self and the absolute.
But how are we to capture sacred time if, by way of succumbing to immoderation, the inevitable obliteration of our consciousness withdraws that access to the immanent world the very moment we are about to pass through its portal? Bataille connects the aporia to the basic problem of representing time:
“The impossible in the common representation of time is met only at the extremes of antecedent and future eternity. In the eternal return, the instant itself is in one impossible movement projected towards these two extremes… Man’s thought forcing him to embrace time is destroyed by this violence: considering time, man’s pride can only throw him into vertigo, in response to which we see triviality. Offering vertigo, holding one to the standard of a fall into the impossible, is the only expression, whatever it might be, of inner experience, in other words, of an ecstatic revelation of the impossible. To achieve this effect it isn’t necessary that we introduce the eternal return (and still less to ground it in science); this is, however, an intelligible sign – and an irrefutable critique of sleep.”20placeholder
This wavering between expression and silence marks Bataille’s philosophy as one that is constantly trapped in a riddle of its own making. But the task is truly impossible: to offer oneself to the vertigo, a sure way to grasp time in its entirety, or to hold onto the vestige of expression, and to lose time in its consequence.
Bataille’s methodology is the opposite of how his friend, ethnographer Michel Leiris, would have normally approached the subject. Traveling in Africa, Leiris confessed to be drawn by a “poetic adventure, a method of concrete knowledge, an ordeal, a symbolic means of stopping time by traveling across space so as to contemplate time.”21placeholder The primary goal of Leiris’s journey had less to do with the actual experience of travel itself than to confront his innermost feelings, to spatialise time (in order to suspend it). Like Bataille, Leiris preferred time’s subjectivity to its artificial import; unlike Bataille, the totality of time for Leiris was a covetous and, more often than not, an aleatory end-product of a systematic assessment of objective findings.
Despite the theoretical traditions that set them apart, Leiris’s exploration of the affinity between time’s subjectivity and the affirmation of self-knowledge is, in a sense, analogous to how Henri Bergson, in Time and Free Will (1889), arrives at the conclusion that links the problem of free will to his theory of duration. Bergson defines pure duration as a lived continuum “which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.”22placeholder This postulate subverts the “spatial thinking” that we typically impose on the notion of time – the division of a continuum into measurable units – and situates temporality within a qualitative interiority, where the past, present and future are commingled in a ceaseless flux, surging toward an indeterminate eternity. As the inquiry veers into a metaphysical and elliptical register, Bergson’s high formalism seems to a large extent maladaptive. One of the main purposes of his essay is to prove that time is inextricably bound up with the intimate truths of our psyche: a probe into the “deeper self” that underlies the “superficial self” that we present to the world.23placeholder The superficial self allows us to perceive no more than a “homogeneous duration” that represents an “extensive symbol of true duration;” a close analysis uncovers, below the plane of homogeneous duration, “a duration whose heterogeneous moments permeate each other,” and “below the numerical multiplicity of conscious states, a qualitative multiplicity; below the self with well-defined states, a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole.”24placeholder
Whether through Bergson’s and Leiris’s efforts to approach the self by dint of objective data, or Bataille’s movement outward from inner experience, they all concede the same point: immediacy, or the true meaning of time, in its resistance to human consciousness, cannot be grasped by the machinery of reason. For Bergson, the only means of tracing the elusive outline of duration is inexorably hinged on our intuitive faculty. But how are we to “intuit” a temporal concept without the risk of transmuting it into some sort of a human construct, into a version of time dictated by our incurable “spatial thinking?” The difficulty of such a task is compounded by the fact that, according to Bergson, our intuition invariably leads us to “translate the intensive into the extensive.”25placeholder The idea of the future, which is “pregnant with an infinity of possibilities,” thus becomes “more fruitful than the future itself.”26placeholder Our intuition plays up the intensity of hope and expands it into an “extensive image,” engendering a sense of promise that reality can rarely match. Bataille also says of future that it is not “the prolonging of the self through time but the occurrence of surpassing, going further than the limits reached.”27placeholder
In other words, the future does not exist per se; it is merely a vision of the unknown, projected by our assured presence in the now. But here the argument runs into yet another snag: if time is ever-flowing, then every “instant”, as we have established, is theoretically already a fragment of the past. The corollary then becomes a classic problem with relativism: the present is the future for a past that has virtually been “surpassed”; what we consider the “future” is simultaneously the future and the past, two poles of a temporal spectrum spinning into an amorphous mass. Following this rather convoluted rationale, are we to see the future as a remote “would-be” still enshrouded in mystery, or is this “would-be” already subsumed into the “has-been” the moment we designate it?
Although it may seem that we are merely parsing a number of self-defeating implications embedded in the word “future”, what it leads to is deeper realisation: that by dividing time into past, present and future, we remain confined within a spatial framework of thought. Yet if we were to yield completely to the fluidity and, we might say, “unreason” of time, by what means could we then justify or make sense of our experience? Language, static and tethered to spatial thinking, would certainly not do; nor would silence suffice, since, according to Bataille, “in the silence our consciousness fails us.”28placeholder
This preoccupation with pure time prompts further inquiry into the fundamentals of the sacred – one of the subjects upon which Bataille failed to reach any tenable conclusions, though was nonetheless able to offer a unique understanding founded in its failure to be logically justified. Ultimately, this understanding is not a systematic theory but a lived inner experience that occurs at the very limits of thought. If language fails us because of its spatial constraints, and silence relates to the faltering of our consciousness, we are left only with the vertigo of the present moment–a suspended time that exists without calculation, project, or end. In this state of immoderation, the boundaries between the self and the absolute collapse, allowing the subject to briefly touch the “real time” that the machinery of reason cannot capture. Thus, for Bataille, the pursuit of pure time is not a journey toward a goal, but a fall into the impossible – a sovereign act that affirms our existence precisely through its own dissolution.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Vols II & III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 2017.
Bataille, Georges. Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.
Bataille, Georges. Manet: Biographical and Critical Study, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons. Milan: Skira, 1955.
Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche, trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.
Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson, M.A. London: George Allen & Company, LTD, 1913.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille. London: Routledge, 2005.
Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 2002.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p.135.
The “absolute distinction,” Hegel continues, is premised on a “movement” wherein pure being and pure nothing are “unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite.” The movement thus is essentially a “becoming”, driven by a difference between objects that resolves the moment it arises. See Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p.80.
Bataille. Visions of Excess, p.135.
Bataille. Visions of Excess, p.135.
Bataille. Visions of Excess, p.135.
Bataille. Visions of Excess, p.135.
Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), p.333.
Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, p.333.
Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, p.333.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.492.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.93.
Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p.133.
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, p.159.
Bataille, Georges. Manet: Biographical and Critical Study, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons (Milan: Skira, 1955), p.38.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Vols II & III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 2017), p.199.
Bataille, The Accursed Share, p.222.
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p.265.
Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), p.307.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p.58.
Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p.24.
Quoted in Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 2005), p.47.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson, M.A. (London: George Allen & Company, LTD, 1913), p.100.
Bergson, Time and Free Will, p.125.
Bergson, Time and Free Will, p.128.
Bergson, Time and Free Will, p.3.
Bergson, Time and Free Will, p.10.
Bataille. On Nietzsche, p.5.
Bataille, Georges. Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p.276.