Question: Do we, as readers, keep finding value in Bataille or De Sade's fictional works as not just odes to base transgression but intellectual texts in spite of their more risque qualities, or in part because of it?
Georges Bataille masturbated in front of his mother’s corpse while his pregnant wife was in the room next door, had a transcendental experience while looking at a monkey’s anus at the zoo, and hung pictures of the corpse of a victim of Imperial China’s dreaded Death by a Thousand Cuts up on his office wall. He was also a philosopher, fiction writer, and the leader of a secret society. As soon as I discovered this information it became necessary that I read everything he had ever written.
Transgressive art is often viewed as cheap shock jocking or thinly veiled sublimation. One of these things is informed by the desire for attention and monetary gain, the other a deceptive way of expressing one’s true self without the ramification of social punishment. The reasons for the popularity of True Crime podcasts and every Netflix dramatization of serial killers are lied about in common conversation. The responses I recieve about why people are so fascinated with these things generally revolve around the idea that the viewer, or listener, is just fascinated at the prospect that a human being could be so twisted and evil. As such, they are tuning in to try and figure out how this person became the monster they are.
I find this answer to be mainly the product of fear. It is my opinion that people are so fascinated by these things because it speaks to a side of themselves that they wish not to air out in public. When somebody watches a shot of an actor playing the role of Jeffrey Dahmer open the refridgerator to grab a beer that is resting next to a severed head, the reaction is not one of horror or flabberghasted disgust. The scene is greeted with awkward laughter masking a minor form of astonished admiration. Every adult has fantasized about being in total control of everything and has wondered what it might be like to live without the shackles of morality hampering their every step. These sorts of shows speak to the portion of the mind that creates nightmares for us while we sleep.
There are certain aspects of humanity that cannot be fully understood without transgression. They can be cognitively grasped with the objective description of events, but everyone must acknowledge that the feeling in the chest is different when somebody describes a murder to you in objective terms as opposed to showing you a picture of a defiled corpse. Different still is the feeling of seeing a defiled corpse in person. Different ever still is trying to contemplate finding beauty in the vision of said corpse.
Bataille’s genesis of the “limit experience” is one such concept that cannot be sufficiently understood without transgression, at the very least, in the medium of text. The idea of the limit experience essentially describes the moment at which a human being has reached the very edge of what is possible as a form of conscious experience. One cannot just imagine “pain,” but one must imagine the “maximum amount of pain that someone can possibly experience.” Same goes for things like freedom, depravity, pleasure, madness, loneliness, etc. It is these particular experiences that Bataille believes breaks down all worldly experience in itself and transports one into a mystical realm of pure human wholeness.
Transgressive art brings us one step closer towards a realistic simulation of our darkest and most hidden desires and fears. It allows us to speculate about such limit experiences. One wonders, with the ever advancing magic of virtual reality, how popular a Murder or Rape Simulator might be were it invented and could provide the user with a realistic sensation of these acts. I am unsure whether such things would increase or decrease the probability of these offenses, but it would be a lie to say that I believe these products would be unpopular. Wider society doesn’t want to know what strangers do behind locked doors, but that doesn’t make unimportant the fact that human beings still engage in whatever they happen to get up to while assured of their privacy. If one is trying to map out the human spirit completely it would be unwise to ignore what society tends to ignore for the sake of politeness and the hope for a reciprocity of disinterest.
Transgression doesn’t necessarily need to be viscerally repulsive. It doesn’t necessarily need to provoke a disgust repsonse from us. It can take the form of contemplating speaking outside the rules of language, or thinking beyond the bounds of reason as we currently understand it. Transgression is generally associated with the violent and the sexualizing of that which we generally find revolting. Just because someone dabbles in something, or thinks about something, doesn’t mean it is something they must make a staple in their lives, or that they are advocating that others must make it a part of their lives. Transgressive literature allows us to alter our mindset into something that is generally unacceptable in order to understand what it is like. Whether our opinion of said transgression improves or deteriorates because of that understand is largely irrelevant because the ultimate purpose is that understanding of something that we have not ever experienced.
One must differentiate between the philosophies of the Marquis and that of Bataille in order for sense to be made. The Marquis de Sade expressed his philosophy as living as if one is completely and totally unbound. He wished to live free from all forms of law, morality, and social convention. Bataille’s philosophy is much more sophisticated when compared to the will of the Marquis. While the man after whom “Sadism” was coined was concerned mainly about fulfilling whatever his violent and sexual whims might have been, Bataille was concerned with the relationship between the profane and the sacred. He thought that by blurring the lines between pleasure and pain, holy and depraved, there might be some transcendant experience of human wholeness that awaited. The very fact that two concepts are opposites, binds them together. Hot and Cold are both temperatures and are considered opposites, but I would argue that the concepts of “Hot” and “Bowel Cancer” are more different from one another than the previous comparison. On the same spectrum, but on opposite ends, are more similar than those which are outside of said spectrum altogether. Hence, the focus on the relationship between the accursed and the pure.
In Bataille’s essay collection Literature and Evil he makes note of something which he deems “hypermorality.” His belief was that whoever wishes to dabble in the transgressive must do so with a sense of extreme responsibility. In order to write something convincing, one must have some understanding of it, and the full understanding of something generally arrives alongside the full experienceof said thing. For one to understand evil, one must, in some sense, be evil. Not evil in the sense of committing evil acts solely for personal gain of some type, but that one must know what it is to enjoy the act of committing evil for its own sake. If the purest Good is performed sacrificially, then so must the purest Evil. Transgressive literature can allow us to get ourselves to a place where we understand the concept of sacrificing one’s well being for Evil without having to resort to experience in order to get there.
The works of Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille have irreconcilable differences, and personally, I prefer the writing and philosophy of Bataille. To answer the original question, I don’t believe that “intellectual text” and “ode to base transgression” need to be mutually exclusive. But because transgressive art allows us to free both our minds and our hearts from social convention, traditional morality, and altogether reason, it is necessary that we continue to view these works as intellectual texts and I think that’s why they’ve remained so timeless to us as readers. Without the transgressive element, in my view, there would be nothing very interesting to think about. However, who is to say that the mass intellectualizing of the profane isn’t just another way of hiding all of our innermost lusts? It is this uncertainty that all of us must either decide to free ourselves from, or remain protected by.