Being in the Moment: Sovereignty in Bataille

The Accursed Share, Volume 3: Sovereignty, Georges Bataille
Chapter 1: Knowledge of Sovereignty
1.1
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.




1.2

“What distinguishes sovereignty is the consumption of wealth, as against labour and servitude, which produce wealth without consuming it,” writes Bataille. At one extreme, the completely “sovereign individual consumes and doesn’t labour” while at the other extreme is the slave and a person “without means”. These have to labour and reduce their consumption to necessities. Necessities are the things without which one cannot survive or work. A worker who has to work consumes the fruits of his labour which would not exist if he was not working while the sovereign in contrast consumes the “surplus of production.” The sovereign “enjoys the products of this world – beyond his needs,” and therein lies his sovereignty. But if those are the two extremes, that also means that there are many people in between, who have degrees of sovereignty or moments of it.

For Bataille, sovereign life begins only after one has secured life’s necessities. Only then does sovereign life become possible. In section 1.1, he mentions how a beggar can also be sovereign compared to a bourgeois. This seems to contradict Bataille’s claim of when sovereign life can begin. However, if we consider characters like Diogenes the Cynic who infamously lived in a barrel or Socrates, we can see that they are sovereign because they need very little material goods before they began living sovereignly. Hence, once the basic needs of a beggar are met, he can also live sovereignly, in contrast to the bourgeois who has more material possessions but are unable to enjoy these possessions in themselves. They can only use these in a utilitarian way, where they try to always extract some productive value from it.

Bataille writes: “The sovereign (or the sovereign life) begins when, with the necessities ensured, the possibility of life opens up without limit.” This lack of limits puzzles me. How I reconciled it is that once we have managed to secure life’s necessities, we then have infinite possibilities of how we want to live. The possibilities are, in that way, “without limit.” Another way of understanding the sentence can be that once our necessities are secured, sovereign life becomes possible and if one does not seize that possibility, it is not because it was in some way blocked or limited but simply because one chose not to be sovereign, hence putting all the responsibility of being sovereign on us. How is sovereignty a choice?

Bataille writes: “Sovereign [is] the enjoyment of possibilities that utility doesn’t justify.” Isn’t enjoyment or receiving pleasure from our acts already utility? Bataille is not using the term utility in that way. In volume 1 of The Accursed Share, Bataille has explained that by utility, he means the limited utility of a restrictive economy where acts are conducted for a “productive” purpose, and not the utility of happiness and pleasure which is the original meaning of utility. For instance, instead of writing a poem as an expression of one’s feelings, or painting a canvas to express beauty, the artist does it primarily for the money he can get when he sells those works, i.e. he does it for a productive purpose, in this case, to make money. Not that making money is wrong but it is not being sovereign if money is the objective that motivates you to do the act in the first place.

“Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty,” he reiterates. It is when we lead our lives not for some productive end in the future. If we are after some productive end, to Bataille, that is called work. Work is directed towards wages and profits according to Bataille. The worker who works for wages does not “escape the circle of constraint” but instead is within it, where “he works in order to eat [later], and he eats in order to work [later].” The “sovereign moment” in contrast is when “nothing counts but the moment itself.” However, Bataille is not saying that for a wage worker, it is not possible to be sovereign at all, to have no sovereign moments. He talks about a worker who drinks a glass of wine as an escape from the reality of his work life, of escaping the necessity which compels him to work. In that moment, Bataille thinks the worker experiences a “miraculous element of savour” which according to him, is the “essence of sovereignty.” My thoughts on this is that while I understand how the worker that indulges in a glass of wine can be having a sovereign moment, if he is however addicted or needs the alcohol to sustain himself in his life of work and drudgery, that is also not sovereign.

Bataille says that in that moment of intoxication, the worker experiences a miracle, the “miraculous sensation of having the world at his disposal.” When we satisfy our necessities, we are only fulfilling the animal part of ourselves. When we go beyond our needs, to satisfy our desires, we are seeking miracles. He makes clear that these miracles need not be costly extravagances. Bataille gives an example of being delighted by sunshine in spring on an empty street which even the poorest people can enjoy. I myself had such a moment just today, when I was walking past this father and his son who was playing with a soap bubble-maker. There was a slight wind, and the bubbles took off in the air. There were a lot of bubbles and two unrelated kids were jumping around in them. I paused for a moment just to take in the scene, it felt magical to me. So yes, ‘the moment’ is about being transported, caught up in just what was happening without thinking about it. It perhaps is what happens when musicians, dancers and other artists are talking about when they say they are ‘in the flow,’ where they are no longer thinking of the notes on the music sheet or the next move to make but when they are completely immersed in the music or in the dance, when they feel as if they and the dance are one. The dance is them and they are the dance. It is hard to describe, but if you consider your own experience when you had such moments, I think you would understand what Bataille means. I hope you can find some.

More broadly, Bataille thinks that miracles can appear in the “form of beauty, of wealth, […] of violence, of funereal and sacred sadness, […] of glory” which we experience in “art, architecture, music, painting or poetry.” What is experienced is suspension, being struck by wonder, and the feeling of miraculousness. He thinks that just surviving through meeting our necessities is not enough, citing the Bible: “Man does not live by bread alone.” More is needed. The remaining part of the verse is “… but on every word that comes from the mouth of God,”[1] that is, man also needs the divine. In case you are wondering, Bataille is an atheist so he isn’t citing the bible as authority but because it is an important work of literature that has influenced many, the same way one would quote Tolstoy or Shakespeare. Bataille sees the divine as a part of the miraculous. He thinks what is divine is ambiguous, where he wants to include the “impure and the repugnant.” He hence modifies the notion of divine to sacred and then to the miraculous, so that he can include eroticism, death and birth. “Death and birth communicate to us the clearest sensation of the miracle of the sacred,” he writes. He will focus on death in chapter 2, while he had already written extensively on eroticism, which he devoted the entire volume 2 of The Accursed Share to.



1.3

To further develop his thesis on what sovereignty is, Bataille considers Hegel’s conception of knowledge. For Hegel, knowledge is not what is known in an instance but is something that unfolds over time, through discourse. Knowledge is gained through effort, i.e. work and is not just what is obtained at the end of the process of that work but is the entire operation. “To know is always to strive, to work; it is always a servile operation,” according to Bataille. Since to work is not to be sovereign, “knowledge is never sovereign.”

Since knowledge is not just what is given in the moment but needs to “unfold in time,” knowledge is not sovereign. “To be sovereign, it would have to occur in a moment,” writes Bataille. Hence we know nothing of the moment, i.e. we have no knowledge of what occurs in the ‘moment’ and thus we know, knowledge-wise, nothing of sovereignty, which however is of supreme importance to us.

Paradoxically, even though we have no knowledge, “we are in fact conscious of the moment. (Indeed, we are conscious of nothing but the moment.) But this consciousness is at the same time a slipping-away of the moment,” writes Bataille. To rephrase, we are aware of the moment. All that we can even be aware of takes place in moments. However, when we try to cognise that moment, it slips away. If it is not clear by now, by moment, Bataille is not referring to a short period of time, but the state of being sovereign, however much time that state remains. He is talking about the moment, not just a moment.

He continues: “Consciousness of the moment is not truly such, is not sovereign, except in unknowing. Only by cancelling, or at least neutralising, every operation of knowledge within ourselves are we in the moment, without fleeing it.” As noted in section 1.2, what is experienced in the sovereign moment is suspension, being struck by wonder, and the feeling of miraculousness. When in the moment, we are not rationalising or calculating. We are not trying to figure out the benefit or profit that can be made from what is happening at that moment. Instead, we suspend our thinking processes, and are transported outside of our reason and our cognition, as if what is happening is something outside of the laws of science, which is what a miracle is. Knowing is suspended and anticipation vanishes. We stop expecting things to happen, our expectations being conditioned by our knowledge of how things normally take place through scientific explanations or through our previous experiences.

This suspension happens when we are “in the grip of strong emotions that shut off, interrupt or override the flow of thought.” Bataille gives instances of this, when we “weep, […] sob” and when we “laugh till we gasp.” Hence he does not mean a small giggle or a quiet tear but when we are overwhelmed by our emotions such that it leads to intense crying or laughing. It is however not the tears or laughter that leads to suspension of thought and hence knowledge, but the objects that evoked the tears or laughter. “The laughter or the tears break out in the vacuum of thought created by their object in the mind,” he clarifies. In these moments, thoughts of the object “dissolve” into nothing. How then can we know anything about it if it is nothing in the moment? How can Bataille even say anything about the moment? He answers by pointing out that we do know of the period prior to the moment. Hence we can “speak” of what is sovereign.



1.4

While laughing can bring one into the moment, Bataille focuses on tears, happy tears in section 1.4, not just tears of joy but being emotionally moved to tears. “Only a miracle, caused those happy tears to arise,” he writes. A miracle is when you do not expect the event to recur or for it to come from our efforts. It is something “impossible but yet there it is.” He alludes that enjoying art can put one in the moment because it is a response to the unanticipated, to a miracle, which is why making good art requires genius, because genius is unexpected while talent in someone brings a rational expectation of a good result.

While miracles can be good, Bataille explains that we can have also bad miracles that likewise “takes one’s breath away,” death being the paradigmatic example.



1.5

“The miraculous moment is the moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING,” according to Bataille, who wrote the word ‘nothing’ in capital letters for emphasis. Anticipation makes us miserable and enslaves us because it “subordinates the present moment to some anticipated result.” In the miracle, this anticipation becomes nothing because we are in the moment, no longer focused on some future result but just being in the present, “the moment illuminated by a miraculous light, the light of the sovereignty of life delivered from its servitude.”

Since to be in the moment is not the seeking after of knowledge, not an act of thinking but instead a suspension of thought, Bataille “resolved long ago not to seek knowledge, as others do, but to seek its contrary, which is unknowing.” The reason why thinking is not being in the moment, not being sovereign, is because thought is subordinated. Thought is directed towards some anticipated result, and being in the moment is contrary to being directed towards some future result.

Life is filled with moments where the “ceaseless operation of cognition is dissolved.” Bataille had given examples of laughing so hard that one is gasping and an outpouring of tears, which breaks off our train of thought. The object of laughter, tears, “ecstasy, eroticism or poetry” vanishes in the moment. The object remains an object of knowledge up to the point of the moment where knowledge fails. The reason why philosophers find it difficult to grapple with “the problem of laughter, […] poetry, ecstasy, [and] eroticism” is because they approach it through trying to understand it using knowledge, when it is instead unknowing, a NOTHING that takes over. According to Bataille, if thought is a train going towards knowledge, it has to “jump the rails on which it is travelling” if it wants to comprehend the moment.

What characterises the miracle is that they are “uncalculated reactions.” “An unreasoned impulse gave a sovereign value to the miraculous, even if the miracle were an unhappy one,” writes Bataille. Citing Goethe on death, the miraculous moment is when “the impossibility suddenly changed into a reality.” Using death to illustrate this impossibility coming true, the object of anticipation is not the object of desire since we do not desire death though we may anticipate death. We can only anticipate what is reasonable to expect. Anticipation is the “unavoidable calculation of reason,” while our desires are desires of miraculous moments, which we cannot anticipate since it is not reasonable to expect miracles. “Thus, desire gives rise to unjustified hope, to hope that reason condemns,” elaborates Bataille. Our desire is for the moment which is a miracle. Miracles are what we do not expect since they involve a suspension of the laws of science and of our reason. Hence in desiring (for a miracle), we are hoping for something that reason tells us is impossible. But a miracle is precisely the impossible becoming a reality.



Chapter 2: The Schema of Sovereignty

In chapter 2, Bataille uses death to explain how we discover sovereignty through it and then how we can be sovereign, even with the threat of death always hanging over us.



2.1

When man first made a tool, a “crude flint tool,” Bataille believes that it is the first time the concept of object was first posited and from there began the objective world. However, in this practice of man making use of a tool, we become a tool ourselves, becoming an object the way the tool is an object. “The world of practice is a world where man is himself a thing,” and not a being for himself. However, unlike non-living things which persists over time, “man dies and decomposes,” becoming a different thing from the man who was alive.

Death is what distinguishes living things from non-living things. The “contradiction” of death is something “sacred […] forbidden.” He explains: “Within the world of practice, the sacred is essentially that which, although impossible, is nonetheless there [...] valorised as something that frees itself from the subordination characterising the world.” Importantly, the sacred is not a negation of the “natural given,” but the act of producing things is what Bataille thinks is the negation of the natural given. I understand the “natural given,” for example a wild animal, to be our authentic selves, in contrast with “the world of things or of practice [which] is the world in which man is subjugated” because there, he is always serving some purpose. In such a world, Bataille thinks we are alienated, made into “a thing […] to the extent that he serves” in contrast with the sovereign man who “alone enjoys a nonalienated condition,” reminiscent of how Karl Marx views alienation. For Marx, the workers are alienated from their labour since they do not enjoy the full fruits of their labour. However, even if one owned the factors of production himself, he is still alienated because he is also subject to the demands of capital and has to exploit the workers.

By natural given, Bataille is invoking the image of man in the ‘state of nature.’ This term, state of nature, comes from Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau who depict how man was originally prior to the formation of society. However, Bataille does not believe the primitive man is free since he writes that from the first tool onwards, man already becomes subjugated. Instead, he compares the sovereign man to the wild animal, which does not use tools but is just living in the freedom of its own power. This sovereign man is sacred because he is “above things, which he possesses and makes use of.” The latter half of that quote is confusing since Bataille has criticised using and producing but what he is trying to evoke is that the sovereign man is the one in charge, which, while he uses things, is not beholden to them. He remains a subject and not the object that is being made used of. In the same way, consistent with my thoughts on the worker drinking the wine in section 1.2, if he can indulge in the glass of wine without being addicted or beholden to it, he can in that way be sovereign.

Bataille is trying to explain how man is not merely a thing, which he would be in the profane world, but he has also a sacred side which is not a thing but nonetheless “real but at the same time is not real, is impossible and yet is there.” Bataille had referred to the ‘natural given’ but now he explains that man only realises that there is this sacred side of himself in the world of practice where his sacred side is being denied. He manages to discover it because there are some “effects that have escaped the negating action of work, or that actively destroy the coherence established in work.” There is coherence found in the “order of things” that has been constructed to serve the world of practice. However, death disrupts that order.

“Death in the midst of things that are well ordered in their coherence is an effect that disturbs that order, and which by a kind of miracle escapes that coherence,” writes Bataille. “Not only was this individual integrated into the order of things but the order of things had entered into him and, within him, had arranged everything according to its principles.” As Heidegger might put it, we are thrown into a pre-existing world and become a part of it, so deeply embedded that we can hardly imagine an alternative. Death is the event, the moment, that shatters the coherence of the order of things, of the world of practice. Hence death has an important place in Bataille’s account of sovereignty.

Death is natural. It is not death but our “consciousness of death” that brings us away from the state of nature. Death’s physical manifestations of decomposition horrify us. According to Bataille, “animals [do] not have this consciousness, they can’t even recognise the difference between the fellow creature that is dead and the one that is alive.” I am not so sure that this is true for all animals; however, his point is that death is natural and it is not so much death in itself that is fearful but the consciousness and anticipation of it that is frightful.



2.2

Death contravenes the order of things which we have created. “It maintains the unpredictable and elusive movement of everything we have not been able to reduce to the reassuring order,” writes Bataille. We try to control our horror of death by immersing ourselves in the order of the world of practice but this “effort is futile.” We invent fictions like the afterlife and ghosts but the “chilling fear” of death remains with us; it only multiplies our “error” in how we confront death. Because we give value to our productive activities, which cease upon death, that makes our powerlessness towards death all the more agonising.

“In efficacious activity, man becomes the equivalent of a tool, which produces; he is like the thing the tool is, being itself a product,” reiterates Bataille. “The tool’s meaning is given by the future, in what the tool will produce, in the future utilisation of the product; like the tool, he who serves – who works – has the value of that which will be later, not of that which is [in the current moment].” The reason why death is felt as a loss is because we have become a thing which future is lost. However, death is also when we cease to be a thing. “Without death, could we cease being a thing, destroying in us that which destroys us, and reducing that which was reducing us to less than nothing?” asks Bataille. By becoming a thing, we have already been demeaned. Through subordination to work, we are already destroying our sense of self, our sovereignty. Death destroys that destruction. However, is there another way out of being a thing other than death? Bataille asks the question here rhetorically but he has already pointed out that we can regain ourselves through becoming sovereign, to not allow ourselves to be a thing.

“The being that work made consciously individual is the anguished being. Man is always more or less in a state of anguish, because he is always in a state of anticipation […] for he must apprehend himself in the future,” writes Bataille. Some people derive their individuality, their personality, from their work. We see this all the time. When people ask you ‘what do you do?’, what are they really asking? They are not asking what is your activity in that current moment but is really asking what is your job? Most of us immediately understand this which is why we answer, citing our profession. But why do we do that since our jobs are only one part of us, not necessarily even the most interesting or important part? Or is it the most interesting and important part? That is the reduction that comes to my mind that Bataille is referring to.

Our work is a source of our identity but yet is also a source of anguish for us, in so far as our work separates us from whom we truly are. For those who are always anticipating the future, “death is what […] prevent[s] us from attaining ourselves.” Death stops us from achieving our goals in the future since it cuts off any future. Are we right then to fear death? Bataille has a solution to this quandary: “A being that would exist only in the moment would not be separated in this way from itself in a kind of ‘traumatism’,” i.e the trauma of death. He elaborates: “If we live sovereignly, the representation of death is impossible, for the present is not subject to the demands of the future,” which would then allow the sovereign being, while not able to escape death itself, to escape the “anguish of death.” Dying itself is not the hateful thing, it is “living servilely [that] is hateful.”

In the light of what had gone before, the next paragraph is puzzling. Bataille talks about the sovereign being resisting “individual consciousness, whose principle exists within him.” He seems to think that this individual consciousness is what prevents a person from becoming a sovereign being. Bataille writes: “The individual affirmation is ponderous; it is the basis for reflection and the unhappy gravity of human life: it is essentially the negation of play,” while he thinks that the sovereign being, in response to his consciousness and his consciousness of death, opposes it with a “playful impulse that proves stronger in him than the considerations that govern work.” How I made sense of this is that by individual consciousness, Bataille means what we would call ego and egotism. So being sovereign is not about being egotistical. Being egotistical in fact will cause one to feel the weight of life. Instead one should adopt a playful attitude.

Bataille is not one who shies away from following his ideas to its logical conclusion: “Sovereign affirmation is based only on the play of unconsidered sentiments, as are the impulses of rivalry, of prestige, the rebelliousness and intolerance toward the prohibition that has death and killing as its object.” The darker side of sovereignty also means that “the impetus of the sovereign man makes a killer of him.” How can we understand this? Just as death has an important role in Bataille’s account of sovereignty, as the moment that shatters the coherence of the order of things, killing, the obverse of death, is analysed by Bataille also.

Because of our repulsion towards death, the world of practice “set[s] many limits on the ravages of death.” We have customs and rituals surrounding death, to give it a “precise and limited form to the moral disorder that results” from it and society has also a prohibition on killing. While acknowledging that civilisation sets limits to preserve its existence, such as prohibiting killing another human being, Bataille writes: “it is as if the limits were there to be transgressed.” It is the limits that give passion its intensity. According to Bataille, conventions “lead to the refinements of pleasure and cruelty that civilisation and prohibition alone made possible by contravention.” Bataille had already spent the entire volume 2 focusing on sexual transgressions, and his views there are consistent with his treatment of death and murder here in volume 3.

Bataille thinks that although we compel ourselves and others to become a thing, it will not be entirely successful. He thinks that it is impossible for human beings to submit themselves without reservations to necessity because in death, we are revealed not to be a thing. This notion is still passive but Bataille also thinks that there is an “active rebellion” that is not only easy but “bound to occur” eventually. One’s inner desire to regain his sovereignty, to escape “the subordination that he refuses, […] demands the violation of the prohibition that he had accepted.” Bataille writes: “At this price, sovereign existence is restored to him, the sovereign moment that alone finally justifies a conditional and temporary submission to necessity.” Bataille seems to be saying that if there is any value to subordination, it is that it helps us realise our servile condition which then pushes us to seek sovereignty.

Just as his readers are about to think that Bataille advocates murder, Bataille clarifies why he is talking about death and killing: “Sovereignty has many forms; it is only rarely condensed into a person and even then it is diffuse.” Bataille makes clear that sovereignty is a concept and how it is exercised depends on the person’s surroundings and circumstances. He writes: “The environment of the sovereign partakes of sovereignty, but sovereignty is essentially the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have us respect in order to ensure, in a general way, the labouriously peaceful life of individuals. Killing is not the only way to regain sovereign life, but sovereignty is always linked to a denial of the sentiments that death controls.”

Let us unpack that quote. “Sovereignty is […] the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have us respect.” Death is inevitable, everyone knows that including the sovereign person but just because it is inevitable, it does not mean that we have to be ruled and dictated by it, dictated by the “limits that the fear of death would have us respect in order to ensure […] the labouriously peaceful life of individuals.” It does not mean that to ‘maintain the peace,’ we just have to accept the conditions of our lives if we are not happy with them. “Killing is not the only way to regain sovereign life,” but Bataille talks about it just so that we recognise that the logic of sovereignty would take us as far as killing if need be. However, while killing is not the only way, “sovereignty is always linked to a denial of the sentiments that death controls.” The kind of horror we have of death needs to be overcome. We must not, to avoid death, avoid the risks of being sovereign, and submit to the ordered world of practice, where we live in servility. To Bataille, that would be like suffering death before actual death.

What Bataille is getting at is how “sovereignty requires the strength to violate the prohibition against killing.” My reading is that he is not saying that killing is good or permissible, but he talks about a matter as serious as killing so that we understand that a person who wants to be sovereign requires a lot of strength, even so much as to be able to violate the most severe prohibitions. One needs to overcome, “through strength of character, […] all the failings that are connected with death and the control of one’s deep tremors.” To be sovereign requires strength of character to overcome the failures that we would otherwise have when we try to avoid the horrors of death and its associated fears.

Bataille thinks that this fear of death makes us subordinate. “Subordination is always rooted in necessity; subordination is always grounded in the alleged need to avoid death,” he writes. To survive, we submit to what is necessary to stay alive, to avoid death. Bataille writes: “The sovereign world does have an odour of death, but this is for the subordinate man; for the sovereign man, it is the world of practice that smells bad; if it does not smell of death, it smells of anguish.” It is not that the sovereign person does not know about death and its pain. However, to live in a non-sovereign way due to a fear of death and by extension, in subordination, is worse to Bataille since it would be a life of anguish.



2.3

In the sovereign world, it is not that death has disappeared. It is there, but what has been “done away with” is the limits that death dictates. “While death is present, it is always there only to be negated,” according to Bataille. Death is there but its limits are to be denied, to be overcome. We overcome it by making of work play. Bataille writes: “He is not work that is performed but rather play.” What that says to me is that we have to find joy in what we do, the way we enjoy ourselves when we are playing. The joy of play is not just something we get in a future end result but even as we play, we find it fun and meaningful. This same joy of play is something we need to bring into our activities such as work.




[1] Matthew 4:4, Deuteronomy 8:3