Author: Kendra Dority
“We are starting a war,” began the opening statement by the Bataille Student Organizing Committee on Friday, February 1 at the interdisciplinary symposium “The Sacred and the Debased in the Work of Georges Bataille.” “It is a war on coherence, unity, progress, dialogue, tolerance, and, above all, the idea that in order to function we must create wealth, we must do work. . . . We will use our minds to lose our minds,” the committee said to an audience of approximately 100 students, faculty and alumni in Herrick Chapel.
The symposium, which was sponsored by the Religious Studies department in conjunction with the ECLS and CTSJ departments and the Remsen Bird Fund, included presentations from Occidental faculty members. Adjunct Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Malek Moazzam-Doulat, Assistant Professor of ECLS Damian Stocking, Professor of Religious Studies Dale Wright and Professor of CTSJ Elmer Griffin presented. Visiting faculty members included Assistant Professor of Philosophy Sean Kirkland (DePaul University), Professor of Philosophy Karmen MacKendrick (Le Moyne College), Assistant Professor of Philosophy Andrew J. Mitchell (Emory University) and Associate Professor of Philosophy Jason Kemp Winfree (CSU Stanislaus).
During what Moazzam-Doulat called “four-and-a-half hours of mind-bending Bataille,” the presenters discussed sacredness, debasement, violence, stupidity, cruelty and community in the works of the 20th century French thinker. As Moazzam-Doulat explained in his introduction, Bataille was a medieval librarian, an ex-Catholic, a mystic, a writer of pornographic novels and a founder of a secret society that nearly performed human sacrifice. “He was an important but under-appreciated thinker,” Moazzam-Doulat said, citing Bataille’s influence on later philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
“The aim of a conference [should be] the contribution of knowledge to a field,” Kirkland said at the beginning of his presentation “The Time of the Desert.” “This conference surely cannot have that aim.”
Citing Bataille’s idea that doing productive “work” stifles and enslaves humans within a homogenous system, and that the way by which humans can break free of this system is to waste energy for no purpose, Kirkland commented on the “purpose” of holding a conference on Bataille. “In order to avoid egregious hypocrisy, this conference should be nothing other than an exorbitant waste of time,” he said.
Stocking delivered a prelude to the conference by quoting pieces of Bataille’s published work The Accursed Share in conjunction with lines of poetry by the Greek victory poet Pindar. Since Pindar is a difficult classical poet to read, Stocking explained, he can “show us how to approach a conference on Bataille.” In Pindar’s poetry, he said, the athletes seem to be throwing their energy away. These athletes are praised in victory poems “just for [their] uselessness,” Stocking said. Relating this notion to the scholars present at the conference, Stocking suggested that the listeners “see the scholars as useless” and to expect to hear at the conference “extravagant expenditures of thought.”
Winfree discussed the re-valuation of values in Bataille’s work, bringing attention to the ways in which the thinker refused the idea of transcendence and the value in “work” or a project. For Bataille, what is considered of lowest value within a social system becomes that of the highest value.
As such, many of his writings involve subjects like cadavers, toes and excrement. Wright, who presented “Bataille’s A-theology and the Zen of Laughter,” noted that one of the followers of the Surrealist movement in France called Bataille the “excremental philosopher.” “I hope he burst out in laughter [when he heard that],” Wright said, stating in his presentation that laughter is an “awakening of the mind” and a way to “mock intellectual security and grasping.”
Before Griffin presented “Stupidity and Bataille,” which discussed the ways in which Bataille’s work preserves existing relations of power, he shared a story of his own experience with Bataille’s novel The Story of the Eye. Griffin commented that he remembered his wife being “absolutely horrified” by this pornographic, socially transgressive work.
Griffin also commented on the location chosen for the conference. “This is outrageous,” he said, referring to the discomfort one might feel discussing the subject matter in Bataille’s works in Herrick Chapel. “In any serious conference on Bataille, the presenters should be naked,” he added.
“It was appropriate [to hold the conference] in a chapel,” Moazzam-Doulat said. “Or, should I say, ‘appropriately inappropriate.’ We’re not thumbing our nose at anyone. This is an honest effort to reengage with the sacred.”
Moazzam-Doulat also said Bataille “claimed his whole life to be trying to found a religion.” Bataille’s writings express a desire to reevaluate the sacred after he found that the “way we have historically conceived of God is not viable anymore,” he said.
“Having Herrick Chapel as the location was both a stroke of genius and a pain in the ass,” Van Whiting (senior) said after attending the conference. “It was entertaining to have it there, but the acoustics were lousy.” Whiting became interested in the Bataille conference after working with Stocking on related academic material.
The symposium was conceived last year after a similar symposium on tragedy and community that explored the works of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. A group of students approached Moazzam-Doulat and Stocking and “demanded more,” Moazzam-Doulat said. Students expressed interest in a conference on Bataille because his works influenced Nancy and they wanted to continue in that direction. The symposium was the result of student action and engagement, Moazzam-Doulat said.
Moazzam-Doulat also said that an interdisciplinary symposium on French philosopher Maurice Blanchot is in the early stages of planning for the next academic year. In the same way that a symposium on Bataille was planned after a conference on Nancy, the next conference on the works of Blanchot will be a continuation of the ideas discussed at the Bataille symposium. “These are people working out the same problems,” Moazzam-Doulat said.
The next conference will, like the symposium on Bataille, reflect student involvement. “It will be what students want to make of it,” Moazzam-Doulat said.
Bataille’s published works are available for purchase at the Oxy Bookstore.
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