Shannon Winnubst, ed.: Reading Bataille Now.

Connor, Peter

Shannon Winnubst, ed.

Reading Bataille Now.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2007.

Pp. 300.

US$65 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34822-7); US$24.95 (paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21882-7).

In her 'Introduction', Winnubst argues that Bataille, a 'literary bad boy' still associated in Anglophone scholarship almost exclusively with his 'erotic fiction' (2), remains neglected in the realm of serious philosophy, political theory and, especially, economics. The essays in her collection, which 'speak from the contemporary political space of transnational capitalism, hyper-moralism (and) liberalism', focus accordingly on Bataille's three-volume opus on political economy, The Accursed Share. Bataille would have approved: of all his writings he considered those concerning economic theory to be the most important, to the point of imagining (rather fancifully) that The Accursed Share might win him a Nobel Prize in Economics.

This book is divided into four Parts, and includes a preface by Alphonso Lingis. The essays in Part 1, 'Situating Bataille', deal with Bataille's relation to the Marxist tradition, stressing the degree to which he deviated from or transgressed traditional leftist positions. For Jesse Goldhammer, while Bataille 'owes a theoretical debt to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French anarcho-syndicalism' (17), he departs from Marxist and anarchist positions by incorporating into politics a highly original notion of sacrifice as 'a mediated form of self-demolition' (23). Amy E. Wendling argues that Bataille conceives of nature not in Marxist terms of scarcity, but in terms of surplus and profligacy, a stance she attributes to Bataille's 'familiarity with premodern and medieval epistemologies' (40) (Bataille was a medievalist by formation). Focusing on Bataille's shift in emphasis from production to consumption, Wendling suggests that Bataille's human being, unlike the beleaguered bourgeois who can think only in terms of accumulation and self-preservation, 'does not stand over against a hostile nature' (41) but participates in an economy of plenitude and 'sovereign consumption' (46). Pierre Lamarche examines the reasons behind Bataille's recourse to the Marxist notion of 'use value' in his polemic with Andre Breton, and shows how this concept informs Bataille's thinking of sovereignty in The Accursed Share.

Part 2, 'Pleasures and the Myth of Transgression', explores the erotic dimension of Bataille's theory of economy (volume two of The Accursed Share is entitled The History of Eroticism). Shannon Winnubst takes off from Bataille's distinction between sexuality and eroticism, which in itself shifts emphasis away from a heterosexual (reproductive) paradigm of sexuality and privileges instead the register of pleasure. Through an analysis of contemporary sodomy laws, she demonstrates the pertinence of Bataille's a-telic notion of sexuality to queer theory and politics. Zeynep Direk sees Bataille as interested in 'the possibility of sexed communication beyond sexual identities' (105). Invoking Irigaray and Levinas, she seeks to show that Bataille's text refuses to objectify the female body; rather, it opens up the question of an 'ethics of eros' that, accounting for the paradoxes and violence of eroticism, might be generative of 'new norms' (110). Alison Leigh Brown's contribution is a sort of fantasia intermingling autobiography, fiction and literary criticism. It revolves around Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Bataille's essay on this novel in Literature and Evil, Bataille's novel Blue of Noon, and the figure of Malvolio from Twelfth Night.

Part 3, 'Bodies and Animality', opens with an essay on bird-watching by Ladelle McWhorter. Drawing on the writings of Charles Darwin and on feminist critiques of reason, she explores the idea that human mimicking of animals represents 'a kind of embodied coming to know' (160). Lucio Angelo Privitello examines laughter and animality in Bataille, arguing that the two are linked because 'both deny "project" by consuming their very sovereignty' (169). Laughter, of which Privitello offers a welcome typology, can evoke something of the intimacy that was replaced in the modern world (according to one of Bataille's major theses in The Accursed Share) by labor. Dorothy Holland, noting that the theater has often been associated with the potential for transgression, explores issues of performance and staging in theater, focusing on Mnemonic, a 'devised work' by the London-based Theatre de Complicite. Her reflections, tangentially related to Bataille's oeuvre, are often suggestive, especially as regards the Bataillean preoccupations of experimentalism, dramatization, nudity, and above all play (in the sense of performance, but also as the opposite of work).

Part 4, 'Sovereign Politics', looks at some ways in which Bataille's theory of general economy might alter the understanding and even practice of politics today. Andrew Cutrofello makes an ingenious parallel between Shakespeare's critique of nascent capitalism in The Merchant of Venice and Bataille's concept of sovereignty and the aporetic ethics this concept implies. Richard A. Lee Jr., partly on the basis of personal recollections, muses about thinghood, sovereignty and sacrifice in Bataille. According to Lee, Bataille's shift from the restricted to the general economy allows us to move beyond 'concernful dealings with the world of things' (249), a re-positioning he situates usefully in relation to Heidegger. Allan Stoekl reflects on the relevance of Bataille's theory of expenditure, excess and waste in an era of resource scarcity and ecological anxiety. Drawing on contemporary theories of sustainability, he posits 'a kind of ethical aftereffect' (261) of Bataille's economic theory whereby expenditure might remain compatible with survival and preservation.

Several of the essays here are what the editor calls 'performative', 'playfully inviting us to engage . . . excess through their very writing' (8). The inclusion of scholarly, creative, and hybrid essays gives the collection a catholic, wide-ranging (even free-wheeling) feel: Hegel, Nietzsche and Mauss are dutifully referenced, but so are Evelyn Fox Keller and Steven A. LeBlanc, Donna Haraway and Jerzy Grotowski; even the Blue Oyster Cult gets a mention. The consideration of issues related to theater and performance here opens up a new and exciting avenue in Bataille studies, complementing existing and better-known scholarship on ritual and sacrifice. The most searching contributions are those (e.g., Wendling, Stoekl) that revise and re-vitalize Bataille's economic theory by bringing it into relation with contemporary work in biology, archeology, environmentalism and eco-economy. In these essays we get a sense of the scope and potential of the 'Copernican transformation' of political economy that Bataille sought to effect in The Accursed Share.

Peter Connor

Barnard College