Bataille's Defence of Hegelian Dialectics

GEORGE Bataille’s early writings, in particular, reveal a profound distaste for the way Hegelian dialectics had become increasingly entwined with Marxist ideology. At least as far as the former is ordinarily understood, because for Bataille the reconciliation of opposites leads to something progressive and is therefore clearly at odds with his own glorification of base matter.

Taking matter as a starting point, Bataille rejected the more pragmatic materialism that had crept into Marxist theory on account of its tendency to construct a scientific edifice. Bataille’s base materialism, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to scientific or political systems because - as far as he is concerned - structural techniques of this kind find issues pertaining to filth, degeneration and decay extremely uncomfortable. Marx, despite the eventual transmogrification of his ideas into Stalinism and Maoism, harboured a distinctly utopian and perhaps even idealistic interpretation of the future and one that has little in common with Bataille’s rather bizarre penchant for foulness, excrement and decomposition.

Returning to the question of Hegelian dialectics, if the coupling of a negative (thesis) with a positive (antithesis) merely leads to something progressive (synthesis), the Bataillean notion of base matter is lost altogether. In other words, whilst Marxism speaks of the importance of materialism and claims it for its own the ideology’s heavy reliance on Hegel inevitably leads to the dilution of that which is negative and this, for Bataille, results in a pale imitation of materialism itself. Bataille would have us believe that Marxism without the brutal realities of flies, faeces and fornification derails the process of heterodoxy and thus ridding capitalist society of its bourgeois values.

It is here, perhaps, that Bataille’s philosophy begins to approach the more ‘extreme’ end of Primitivism. Although it seems logical to suggest that the collapse of modern civilisation would result in technological regression, Bataille would no doubt have considered attempts to retain at least a semblance of mechanisation within a Primitivist context in the way that he viewed communist dialectics as a means by which Marxism betrays materialism through the forging of an unforgivable pact with the Hegelian devil. Even the materialist interpretation of history, he would have argued, ultimately fails to overcome the idea of history.

We may detect a similar outlook in Bataille’s economic proposition that Marxism’s nonsensical idea of ‘liberation’ through work should be replaced by the ‘orgiastic’ event of the tribal potlatch and, consequently, the destruction of wealth per se. At the same time, one must question whether the successful facilitation of a Bataillean negative ends up contradicting itself by becoming a positive in the eyes of its protagonists.