Cism as a move beyond principled equivocation6 though

cism as a move beyond
"principled equivocation,"6 though surely not beyond ambigu
ity. Bataille's claim that the summit of human life is
realized in the impossible coincidence of consciousness and death is not in itself an act of resistance against political tyranny. Yet to the
extent Bataille sought to teach (through a certain mode of self-enactment) "exercises" by which this summit could be attained, I will argue
that B
ataille worked against the forces destructive of human dignity and sovereignty. Bataille's
mystical texts
aimed (though this projective "aiming" perpetually undid itself)
to teach people how to be sacred.

Bataille proposed a method, a training regimen, a technique, in the form of an exemplary life
pattern
: no Kierkegaardian "training in Christianity,"7 needless to say, but a course in an anti-Christian holiness
hostile to all
forms of authoritarian domination
.

At: gender
Bataille’s theories hinge on the innate sexual difference between the masculine and
the feminine – he can be considered one of the original sexual difference scholars
Kingston 14
(Andrew Kingston, “Bataille and Feminist Theory”, 18/1/14 shr)
An account of the gendering of Bataille’s transgression demonstrates how it remains within a specular
and speculative economy
in which the writing subject is always at a certain distance from what he ‘sees.’ While he might desire to totally lose himself
in the loss of another, the writing subject always remains conscious enough of that loss to theorize. Bataille’s transgression may thus be read against itself in order to
demonstrate that
the ‘masculine’ writing subject
always
maintains his position vis-à-vis a witnessed ‘feminine’ loss
(Surkis, 1996: 29-30). More will be said about specularity in Bataille’s writing below,[6] but
what can be
immediately
noted is that
this assessment,
while
perhaps
rightly critizing the attitude of an uncareful reader
, seems to paint women as victims precisely at the cost of
missing Bataille’s larger point
: that
femininity as loss threatens
not the masculine as such, but rather
the very division
through which the masculine and the feminine exist separately
and in general (or such is the thesis of this paper). After all, it is
the construction of a symbolically mediated desire that Bataille is addressing, which ultimately renders the signifiers of this desire more or less arbitrary. This is
confirmed by a passing sentence in Erotism, where
Bataille writes that “[i]t would be quite wrong to say that women are
more beautiful or even more desirable than men
” (1962: 131).
Edwarda could have just as easily
—under different
cultural circumstances—
been Edward.
The conceptualization of sexual objects in Bataille’s writing originates from Freud’s
theory that the feminine is contained within a masculine regime of phallocentrism –
the distortion of this visuality can only be achieved through a reinterpretation of one’s
own sexuality via unproductive expenditure
Kingston 14