8/6/2019 Bataille - Notes on War

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/bataille-notes-on-war 1/4

Additional Notes on the WarAuthor(s): Georges Bataille and Annette MichelsonSource: October, Vol. 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing (Spring, 1986), pp. 29-31Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778546 .

Accessed: 23/02/2011 21:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of 

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.

http://www.jstor.org

8/6/2019 Bataille - Notes on War

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/bataille-notes-on-war 2/4

Additional Notes on the War

DisconcertingReactions to the War

The difficulties inherent in the passage from a state of chaos to one of

organic existence and to the right of command are of a complex nature.

Not only are the masses still unaware of the irreconcilable opposition be-

tween their own cause and the mental paralysis prevalent in political commit-

tees, but the poorly conceived, confused deals concluded among party leaders

on all sides have not reduced the general tension; they have led viable move-

ments, one after the other, to a dead end.

As to our foreign complications, the Right is mainly responsible for thepolicy of enslavement of the German people, and now, when its results are be-

ginning to demonstrate the radical absurdity of that policy, the Right has passedthe task of defending it on to the Left. The Left, supported and actually spurredon by the Communist far-Left, has, without a moment's hesitation, assumed

the defense of the most inhuman treaty ever imposed upon a free people-andthis without even the justification of the effectiveness of the crueler clauses. The

Right and the far-Right have thus abnegated one of the essential componentsof their wretched victory; they cease, in the eyes of their constituents, to em-

body armed violence, girded for the turbulent expression of the nationalist will

to greatness. At the same time the Left, adopting the policy of radical German-

ophobia traditional on the Right, abandons its mission of furthering harmony

among peoples.We can even go so far as to say that a human policy, free from that mass

excitation which must inevitably end in slaughter, might very well gain from a

present minority of those naturally inclined to the Right, a reception lackingwithin the majority of the masses on the Left.

There is no question of our defending the posture to which French nation-

alism, in its senility, is driven, that "sacred self-interest" to which it is reduced,that renunciation with which it faces a world clamoring for life. In a time of

total disturbance, nothing exceeds the ignominy of that puerile abdication. Thevery beasts of prey, in their natural cruelty, seem less inexcusable than the

8/6/2019 Bataille - Notes on War

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/bataille-notes-on-war 3/4

OCTOBER

legendary ostrich, reduced to hiding its head to cut off sight. Setting aside that

facile agitation that enlists the spineless in organizations such as l'ActionFrancaise or La Croix de Feu, those with an appetite for effective action, those

hitherto kept aloof by their own interests from the Left's solutions, begin to

realize that neither an exhausted nationalism nor a shattered capitalism offers

any way out.

Every possible solution finds individual supporters, without any precisionof expression or value of attraction which might lead one to foresee its predomi-nance. No effective will compatible with a truly human freedom and no will to

freedom compatible with effective will has produced an assembling of even em-

bryonic strength. The balance of opposing forces seems to result in a kind of

equilibrium, since no one force is so constituted that it can even tentatively re-

spond to the needs signaled by general anxiety; the situation, tense though it is,must for a long time remain so. There is as yet no really obvious way out, none

that tempts the mass in its increasingly agitated state.

RevolutionaryAgitationand WorldConsciousness

It can be asserted that in today's France, political agitation cannot call

upon a permanently depressed national consciousness incapable of aggressiveaction. It is, therefore, only insofar as men appeal to the realities of world con-

sciousness that the mass can be stirred. At first, this appeal is bound to appeartrivial. World consciousness, far from evoking strength and the possibility of

the organic state, can be expressed only in anxiety.Born of extreme misfortune, delivered wailing, by cannon fire in the depths

of a war-muddied earth, the consciousness of human solidarity still burns and

depresses, like fever. Thus far we have known unity among men of different

nations only in circumstances of extreme irony, at those moments of universal

enslavement in the work of mutual butchery.But who is to say that the mass of humanity is never to feel that violent

emotion which alone can liberate men from the national slavery and frenzy

which send them to their death? Who is to say that we shall never see, assembledupon this earth, crowds, caught up together in a trance, rising to end the idiocyof patriotism?

Men today are overwhelmed by an awareness that if nations are allowed

to wage wars for the safeguard of interests wholly unrelated to the common in-

terest, life will become wholly impossible. Now, you cannot spread this ele-

mentary truth among mankind without proposing that it take up arms directlyagainst oppression. The Russian Revolution took on its full meaning when it

liberated the masses from a slaughter that was totally oppressive. A revolution-

ary cohesion, an organic cohesion will be possible in France only if men know

that they are fighting to deliver the world from all those who have given it overto war. What was made possible in Russia by an extreme decline of authority

30

8/6/2019 Bataille - Notes on War

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/bataille-notes-on-war 4/4

AdditionalNotes on the War

will, however, be realized here only through a revolutionary increase of author-

ity. Only a firm and coherent power which has eliminated all opposition couldface the world with clarity, with unparalleled disinterestedness, with the will to

cohesive union among all peoples of the world.

It must be acknowledged as a general principle that an imperative strength

develops most fully in relation to a sense of inferiority. The inferiority complexof the leader has always played a role in the development of his determinant ac-

tion; as a rule, an odd lack of self-confidence on the part of history's dynamicleaders has driven them to those antithetical excesses required to prove to

themselves how unjustified this lack of confidence was. Similarly, we can claim

that national feeling achieves that extremity of pride and assertiveness only in

those countries in which doubt or anguish has arisen; that assertiveness andconfidence are thus the function of prior doubt and fear.

We cannot, of course, claim that those who reflect world consciousness

are necessarily carried to power by the existence of that doubt and anguish, but

the force with which the demand is laid down immediately unshackles them. Ifa real movement were to be generated by an anguish of this dimension, it would

necessarily assume the ardent, unpredictable, highly courageous character ofthe great religious movements which have in the past overwhelmed whole

peoples with the revelation of the universal value of existence. If men were tocome forward and declare that the time has come to lift the age-old curse which

haunts the human race, can we doubt that their voices would ring out with a

sudden, shattering force, that very force now demanded by a whole world in

anguish? Out of man's present extreme impotence, tomorrow can bring forth

only a POWER containing the resolution of an absurd and ancient destiny - or

misfortune in the extreme. ... *

* The text breaks off here. -trans.

31