Being in the Moment: Sovereignty in Bataille

The Accursed Share, Volume 3: Sovereignty, Georges Bataille
Chapter 1: Knowledge of Sovereignty
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Bataille begins the volume by explaining what he is not describing in his concept of sovereignty. His sovereignty is not the sovereignty of states but the sovereignty of people. What is sovereign is not “servile and subordinate.” Sovereignty belonged to kings and chiefs, gods and their priests which by being close to the gods shared in their sovereignty. However, the sovereignty that Bataille is interested in is the sovereignty that all people possess.

Sovereignty in The Accursed Share, Volume 2 & 3 by Georges Bataille: First Impressions

What is sovereignty for Georges Bataille? When was the last time you did something for its own sake, where you indulged in an activity for the sheer pleasure it gives you and not for some other purpose such as earning money? Do we go for a run so that we can enjoy the wind in our hair and the change of scenery, or do we do it for some functional purpose such as to lose weight just so that we can become more attractive for other people?

On Diversions from Pensees by Blaise Pascal

Is man a happy creature? Is it in our nature to be happy? Blaise Pascal in his Pensees, translated as ‘thoughts,’ muses over these questions in his chapter on diversions and concludes rather pessimistically that we are not happy creatures. The book is a collection of his notes and was not meant by him to be published in its current form. Hence a reader of the work might find it fragmentary and incomplete. This is not a terse and rigorous philosophical treatise. He makes non-sequiturs, repeats himself often and some sentences are merely phrases. He wasn’t being intentionally cryptic -- this is his notebook we are reading though he did have in mind for it to serve as a basis for a work on Christian apologetics, i.e. a defence of the Christian religion. Unfortunately, this project still remained incomplete upon his death in 1662. Pascal is not a theologian, in fact most people would recognise his name from his theorems in mathematics but he was more than that, he was also an important and interesting thinker. There are some valuable jewels in this work such as his chapter on diversion which I would discuss here.

Selfhood Versus Sociality in Hobbes and Rousseau

While both men may seem to harbour views of human nature and the ideal society that are polar opposites, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) share important similarities such as self-preservation as the primary goal of man, the need to give up some rights in exchange for the benefits that can only come from society, and the need for coercion and punishment to keep the people in line. Both works are polemical, with an agenda to convince and frighten their readers into accepting their conclusions. Coming from an era of extreme political turbulence, Hobbes’s longing for stability resulted in his doctrine of the leviathan, a powerful sovereign to control the otherwise endlessly combative individuals. Rousseau responded to him over 100 years later. An Enlightenment thinker and apostle of the French Revolution, he was keen to overthrow Hobbes’s tyrannical ideas but his thoughts by today’s standards would paradoxically seem also to contain strains of totalitarianism.[1]

Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is about the “coming to be of knowledge.” Understanding the title of his book goes some way to help us understand what this complicated book is about. Phenomenology is the science of experience and so the phenomenology of spirit is the experience or journey that our consciousness makes, where consciousness “comprehends within itself the various SHAPES OF SPIRIT as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge, that is, absolute spirit,” according to the ad that Hegel wrote to advertise this book. [p. 468] These shapes or stations are broadly five stages that we make, starting with consciousness, then self-consciousness, reason, spirit and finally absolute spirit. How this journey proceeds from an earlier stage to a later one is when an earlier stage finds in itself contradictions or oppositions which resolves, leading to a more advanced stage, which in turn runs into contradictions which then resolves, leading to a new stage and so on.