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Georges Bataille and the Surrealist Blake

Georges Bataille and the Surrealist Blake

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 We have long argued that Blake was a proto-Surrealist, but critics are confused about how Blake fits into the story of Surrealism and how they received him. The ‘dissenting Surrealist’, critic, philosopher, pornographer, anthropologist and ‘metaphysician of evil’, Georges Bataille adopted Blake as the presiding spirit of his later work, which puts the sacred and religion at the heart of politics. Breaking with the rationalism of Breton and the Hegel-influenced Marxist left alike, on the eve of WWII, Bataille proposes a Surrealist anti-fascism based squarely on myth, fashioned in the image of Blake, which leads him to found the secret society, Acéphale.Stuart KendallStuart Kendall is a scholar specialising in Georges Bataille, late modernism, environmental humanities and contemporary culture. He is the author of the book Georges Bataille, in the Critical Lives series from Reaktion Books, as well as translating key works by Bataille.Topics discussedBlake and Surrealism | Bataille as librarian and libertine | Bataille’s collaborations | politics, religion, art and literature | a life filled with contradictions | Democratic Communist Circle, La Critique Sociale | Acéphale, College of Sociology | battles with André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre | influence on Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva | psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, anthropology | Breton and Bataille as the two halves of Surrealism | Cabaret Voltaire, Arthur Cravan and militant anti-clericalism: Surrealism’s problem with religion | Why didn’t André Breton love William Blake? | Soupault on Blake and Lautréamont | energy and evil | automatism and Bretonian Surrealism | Surrealism and Communism | Freud, the unconscious, the magical | on the surface of Story of the Eye | translating between Bataille, Breton, Surrealism, and Blake | Alexandre Kojève: for and against Hegel | Surrealism’s enemy within | ‘impossible Surrealism’ | Boris Souveraine, Colette Peignot and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell | Marcel Mauss, potlatch economies | The Accursed Share: energy, exuberance, consumption and expenditure | Blake as a companion of thought for Bataille | mobilizing the masses through the use of myth | “Bataille never counted the pennies” | chaos, indeterminacy and over-determination in Blake | “don’t think I don’t know that you’re f*****g my wife”: obscentity and truth | contraries, negations and dialectics | Jean Wahl, Kierkegaard and the existential turn against Hegel | Corbynites and the Democratic Left | countercultural fascism and Bataille reception.Laure finds Bataille finds BlakeBlake managed, in phrases of a peremptory simplicity, to reduce humanity to poetry and poetry to Evil.Georges BatailleColette Peignot, known as Laure, had read William Blake in Madrid in April or May of 1936. She moves in with Bataille, and days later, he goes and checks out The Marriage of Heaven and Hell from the Bibliotheque Nationale. I mean, what an act of love that is to me. To me, it’s an utterly beautiful story. But that’s the moment when he is part of Acéphale. You know, it’s as the College of Sociology is being founded. It’s as Bataille is looking for myth and religion as ways to expand his political understanding of community and how it’s formed. And so William Blake and his appeal to the sacred, his appeal to the question of what is God and how does God work in the human imagination.Stuart KendallIf you read Job, there are these powerful subterranean currents of Canaanite mythology to do with the conquering of chaos and Yahweh’s defeat of chaos in order to make a world. And my argument is that Blake lets some of the chaos slip back in. When I was reading you on Bataille’s method, I got the similar sense that the reason he defers, the reason not everything adds up, the reason it isn’t a logical series is precisely in order to prevent the reader arriving at an idealist conclusion too early, or ever.There are elements to Blake’s method that directly mirror some aspects of Bataille’s, but this isn’t much commented on because people don’t see that aspect of Blake, and it hasn’t been a big feature of Blake commentary.Andy WilsonI think that William Blake became very important to a certain group of philosophers and critics in France in the 1940s. This is the group associated with Bataille, but also expanding beyond him. Blake offers a way of thinking about contraries and opposition that is non-synthetic, that is not purely Hegelian. And there are many other ways to sort of think about this problem, but that debate and that way of thinking about it had other implications important at that time. Bataille comes to Blake in 1937 at that same moment when he’s looking for alternatives to Marxism. And that’s to say he’s looking for alternatives to Hegelian dialectical thinking. And he’s not alone in that. Now, that problem is one kind of problem when it...
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