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A review by jacob_wren
The Accursed Share, Volumes II & III by Georges Bataille
A few passages from The Accursed Share Volume II & III:
*
Men committed to political struggle will never be able to yield to the truth of eroticism. Erotic activity always takes place at the expense of the forces committed to their combat.
*
It is apparent from the foregoing that all accumulation is cruel; all renunciation of the present for the sake of the future is cruel.
*
When a politician had clearly assumed the objectivity of power, he placed himself effortlessly on a level with the sovereignty that he had supremely denied, with weapons in his hands.
*
It was precisely by rising to the level of this “dreadfulness,” by recognizing in the work of Sade the extravagant standard of poetry, that the “modern movement” was able to bring art out of the subordination in which it almost always had been left by artists in the service of the kings and priests. But nowadays the “modern movement” is relatively sluggish and its first burst of energy was mixed with a tiresome braggadocio. The antecedents it appeals to have more meaning that it does. It often seems to me that art gained by serving a system that was organized by the greater or lesser miring down of bygone sovereignty: in this way, it avoided the trap of individual vanity, which substitutes a ludicrous, more degrading, miring-down for the heavy solemnity of times past. But I will never forget the “dreadful” moment when modern art denounced servitude, the least servitude, and claimed the “dreadful” legacy of the fallen sovereigns. Those who spoke in its name were perhaps only fleetingly aware of an “impossible” to which they dedicated their words. They deluded themselves in turn, asserting rights, privileges, without realizing that the least protest addressed to those who represented things placed them in the line of the privileged ones of the past. Whoever speaks on behalf of sovereign art places himself outside a real domain on which he had no hold, against which he is without any rights. The artist is NOTHING in the world of things, and if he demands a place there, even if this only consisted in the right to speak or in the more modest right to eat, he follows in the wake of those who believed that sovereignty could, without being surrendered, have a hold on the world of things. His business is to seduce: everything is risked if he cannot seduce the spokesmen of that world.
*
The tool, the “crude flint tool” used by primitive man was undoubtedly the first positing of the object as such. The objective world is given in the practice introduced by the tool. But in this practice man, who makes use of the tool, becomes a tool himself, he becomes himself an object just as the tool is an object. The world of practice is a world where man is himself a thing, which animals are not for themselves (which, moreover, in the beginning, animals were not for man.) But man is not really a thing. A thing is identical in time, but man dies and decomposes and this man who is dead and decomposes is not the same thing as that man who lived. Death is not the only contradiction that enters into the edifice formed by man’s activity, but it has a kind of preeminence.
*
Gide was a timid questioner; he sagely asked limited questions, having no feeling for tragic, or serious play. He was a man like any other: I could not offer him any higher praise.
*
…the feigned modesty that is the essence of modesty.
*
Arriving at the end of this work, whose progress led only to the distant point where thought loses itself, I have a troubled feeling. Have I not led my readers astray? Or have I misled them twice?
*
Men committed to political struggle will never be able to yield to the truth of eroticism. Erotic activity always takes place at the expense of the forces committed to their combat.
*
It is apparent from the foregoing that all accumulation is cruel; all renunciation of the present for the sake of the future is cruel.
*
When a politician had clearly assumed the objectivity of power, he placed himself effortlessly on a level with the sovereignty that he had supremely denied, with weapons in his hands.
*
It was precisely by rising to the level of this “dreadfulness,” by recognizing in the work of Sade the extravagant standard of poetry, that the “modern movement” was able to bring art out of the subordination in which it almost always had been left by artists in the service of the kings and priests. But nowadays the “modern movement” is relatively sluggish and its first burst of energy was mixed with a tiresome braggadocio. The antecedents it appeals to have more meaning that it does. It often seems to me that art gained by serving a system that was organized by the greater or lesser miring down of bygone sovereignty: in this way, it avoided the trap of individual vanity, which substitutes a ludicrous, more degrading, miring-down for the heavy solemnity of times past. But I will never forget the “dreadful” moment when modern art denounced servitude, the least servitude, and claimed the “dreadful” legacy of the fallen sovereigns. Those who spoke in its name were perhaps only fleetingly aware of an “impossible” to which they dedicated their words. They deluded themselves in turn, asserting rights, privileges, without realizing that the least protest addressed to those who represented things placed them in the line of the privileged ones of the past. Whoever speaks on behalf of sovereign art places himself outside a real domain on which he had no hold, against which he is without any rights. The artist is NOTHING in the world of things, and if he demands a place there, even if this only consisted in the right to speak or in the more modest right to eat, he follows in the wake of those who believed that sovereignty could, without being surrendered, have a hold on the world of things. His business is to seduce: everything is risked if he cannot seduce the spokesmen of that world.
*
The tool, the “crude flint tool” used by primitive man was undoubtedly the first positing of the object as such. The objective world is given in the practice introduced by the tool. But in this practice man, who makes use of the tool, becomes a tool himself, he becomes himself an object just as the tool is an object. The world of practice is a world where man is himself a thing, which animals are not for themselves (which, moreover, in the beginning, animals were not for man.) But man is not really a thing. A thing is identical in time, but man dies and decomposes and this man who is dead and decomposes is not the same thing as that man who lived. Death is not the only contradiction that enters into the edifice formed by man’s activity, but it has a kind of preeminence.
*
Gide was a timid questioner; he sagely asked limited questions, having no feeling for tragic, or serious play. He was a man like any other: I could not offer him any higher praise.
*
…the feigned modesty that is the essence of modesty.
*
Arriving at the end of this work, whose progress led only to the distant point where thought loses itself, I have a troubled feeling. Have I not led my readers astray? Or have I misled them twice?