"What had the face of politics and imagined itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement." Soren Kierkegaard
The Acephale journal was a literary and religious venture undertaken by the archivist Georges Bataille (September 1897 - 1962) in April 1936, months before the onset of the Spanish Civil War and the confrontation of the international left and right in a preliminary battle for ideological hegemony in Europe. Situated outwards at a wider scale, this was the period of an ascending imperialism, with Fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (October 1935 - February 1937), as well as the Second Sino-Japanese War (7th July 1937 - 2nd September 1945). Increasingly factitious relations were also accruing in Western Europe, with the de-facto exposure of the weakness of the League of Nations by Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, as well as the effective obsolescence of the Washington Naval treaty established in 1922 to prevent an arms race between the major naval powers in its 1936 expiration, and the undermining of its successor Second London Naval Treaty of 25th March 1936 by the withdraw of the Empire of Japan, a major naval power, from the treaty in January of the same year of the treaties signing, as well as the Italian decline to sign the treaty owing to the controversy and sanctions resulting from its invasion of Ethiopia. In effect, this appeared to be a period of resurgent political struggle and opportunity, channelled through the rise of the Soviet Union and the Third International for the partisan left, as well as a perceived immediate necessity to combat the rise of Fascism and imperialism across the globe.
It was in this context, in April 1936, that Bataille and others, in effect, appeared to renounce all traditional images of "political struggle". Forming a secret society, backed around the journal Acephale, granted the public face of the "College of Sociology", Bataille and colleagues turned their backs on the Surrealism of Andre Breton, Contre-Attaque, the combat union alongside other revolutionary intellectuals Bataille himself had helped form, and dedicated themselves under the sign of a headless figure of dream - a resurrected image and ode to long dead gods.
The image of this figure, a headless, Promethean anthropos, ideally contrived in proportion, as in the "ideal" configuration of renaissance art conceived in the effervescence of imperfection and agreement with God's providential reason, is juxtaposed by the detachment, abnegation, of reason - the severance of the "head" and the presence of that head, negating all sense of proportion, as invested in the region of the phallus and vulva - symbolically invested with the rule of pleasure, delirium and desire. Simultaneously invoking the aesthetic purity and rationalism of Enlightenment anatomical perfection, mathematically regulated to the golden ratio, the image of the Acephalous, erupted all notions of beauty and perfection, situating the head, reason, as an outgrowth of the phallus and vulva, and centred at the point symbolically invested with the idea of desire set free. This "Copernican revolution", illustratively mimed in the image of Acephaly, was the de-centring of reason as the motive force of action, and thereby history, to the centricity and superposition of rationality upon the image of desire. In effect, it was not the substitution of desire for reason, but rather the recognition of "reason" as a type of desire, subsumed under and alongside the other objects of that set. Reason was not a force in agonistic conflict with desire, it was a type of desire, in agonistic conflict with other kinds of desire in turn, and this conflict then was not the renunciation, or abnegation of desire, but rather only a desire to not desire. Socratic rationality, illuminated under the incandescent street lighting of modernity, revealed the image of the "truth" besought by the lovers of wisdom to be another source of deception - empty shadows flitting across a cave of disparate axioms, culturally invested and "religiously" inscribed in the ultimate valuations present in conflicting social structures. Kierkegaard's proclamation, almost a century earlier had come true, only under a new articulation "What had the face of Truth and imagined itself to be scientific, has now unmasked itself as a religious movement."
Liberated from attachment to reason, by the very cognition of reason as seated in the "unconscious" and "irrational", the spirits of desire were again enabled to wonder free, receiving libations anew from unsuspecting supplicants. Yet, as always, the domain of a spirit, conceived as an unbounded essence, can have no recourse to a material world defined in all instances by a bounded nature. Alongside the old gods, the speculations of metaphysics and dialogues on the soul were resurrected in turn, and with it, the problem of the interaction, or inhabitance, of spirit in the world, and the manifestation of this habitation in the problem of dwelling. Dwelling, conceived etymologically, derives from the Old English dwellan denotes "to lead into error, deceive, mislead", to go wrong or ere in judgment or belief. It has an innate connection with madness, conceived through the Old English gedweola, meaning "error, heresy, madness." This transcends into its role as stasis, to "procrastinate, delay, be tardy in coming" in its Middle English sense. From this sense of stasis, we gain the latter usage "to make a home, abide as a permanent resident". The residence of unbounded spirit in a material world, defined in all instances by its being bounded, bounded to the "laws" of physics, matter, and regulated order, can only manifest as a form of deception, an "error" or going astray. In this sense, it everywhere appears as a detachment from the formal essence of spirit, manifest in an imprecation, and imprinting, onto the bounded world of matter. This concept of imprecation, or imprinting, we define by the analogy of the "will", of "freedom" and "action". It is the sense, intuitively conceived, that human beings exist as free-actors, that is, ultimately, unbounded spirits, capable of moral action. Evidently, this view is a clear contradiction when maintained against the ordinary sensibility of the proposition establishing the bounded nature of the world; for if all action implicated in the material world is bounded, and the human action if a type of action implicated in the material world and the human being is a material being, then it follows that human action and the human being is bounded. To the degree, then, that we define this concept of being bound properly, that is, that all action is ultimately determined in agreement with physical "laws of nature", it subsequently follows that no action, properly considered, may be said to be "free", but to the contrary, all action must be physically determined with no sense of will. The liberation of the metaphysical spirit, and the immanent detachment from itself that consists in "error", leads to its dwelling in the force of matter and humanity. It is this dwelling, conceived in error, that manifests as the "madness", the "delirium" of moral action, the belief in the freedom of the will and action as an unbounded force. This, then, conceived at the scale of politics, and political action, which everywhere presumes the capacity of human action to effectively change the world, is the masked image of the religious movement, the unknowing delirium of spirit manifest in the force of the world.
Considered in this light, all politics, to the degree that politics retains a belief in the capacity for humans to effect their world in agreement with their own will, is everywhere always a "delirium" a "heresy" from scientific determinism, and hence is always a "religious" movement. All politics is theology, when properly considered. Perceived in this light, then, Bataille's "abnegation" from politics is, in reality, a form of revelation - an uncovering of the truth of the political itself, and by virtue of this fact, a closer attention to the capacity for politics and its self-critique. This self-critique, however, cannot occur at the level of a "rational" inquiry into how human action ought to be oriented, for this presumes again the political axiom of the efficacious power of human action as transformative of the world. Like the proverbial ostrich that buries its head in the sand, this belief invested in political groups is again a "going astray", an unrecognition of the fact of the political as the theological, that restores a sovereignty to reason against desire. For Bataille, in the wake of Nietzsche, the precise characteristic of revelation is the awareness of reason as a kind of desire, not caught in an antagonism against desire, which is in actuality nothing other than itself, but rather sitting amidst a sea of agonies with other powers of desire - other spirits or "gods" bearing upon everyday life. A librational politics, or rather, a liberating theology, can only conceive itself as a "setting free" from the sovereignty of reason, a process already begun by its revealing to be a subset of desire - this is the figure of the acephalous, the image of the superposed head and genitalia, not the loss of reason, but reason as desire and to the extent that is its own end, desire is its object. Full in contemplation of this object, it can come to terms with its reality, liberated from a moral falsehood that perceives its end to be the negation of itself. For Camus, this was the "most virulent anti-politics", but truly considered, it is more akin to a triumphant self-awareness, a setting free from the preoccupying task of the will to truth. In this sense, as is the case with Nietzsche, there is far more of Socrates in Bataille then might meet the eye.
This Socratic overture in both Bataille and Nietzsche occurs at the level of recognising sense as deception, the point of distinction, clearly considered above, is the identification of reason itself as a subset of sense and forms of sensibility. Reason, then, which aims to overcome the deception of sense, is ultimately shown to be the most proliferating purveyor of deception, because it everywhere consists in the end to negate itself as falsehood. Politics, conceived in a secularised light, is the par excellence manifestation of this falsehood of reason, together with modern science and "rationalisation" that claims the completion of the disenchantment of the world. Camus's consideration of Bataille as possessed by a "virulent anti-politics" is in this sense only partially true, because what Bataille ultimately is aiming to achieve is the illumination of politics as always-already possessed by multitudinous spirits of desire, desire that gives the impression of the power of "action" as channelled through the will, but ultimately cannot escape our determination by powers to which we can give no account. All politics, conceived as rational attention to some object of liberation, ultimately fails by this very cause, because its truth is essentially always a power of possession, bearing intentions that are not our own, but to which "we" are merely the effect, not the cause. In this sense, Bataille's "irrationalism" is, in actuality, an exceptionally cogent, and disciplined rationality, an acknowledgment of the claims of rationalisation pushed to its limit, shone under its own light to reveal the flittering shadows of the cave to which it is always tied. The "religion of madness", is nothing other than the honest acknowledgment of the contradiction inlaid within the claim of reason itself, and by consequence, the revelation of reason as a religious power understood through the metaphor of unbounded spirits going astray, facing against a bounded and determined world - a constitutive madness of all experience. For Socrates, the soul was incarcerated within the prison of the body, and Bataille perfectly acknowledges this, but only from the other perspective, stating "We must escape our heads like prisoners their prisons." The problematic has not changed, merely the perspective from which it is spoken.
The demystification of the political is subsequently the re-enchantment of moral action, and with it an internal critique of all projects of political normativity. This is the threat of liberation that is so vehemently opposed by Simon Weil, who asserts that for Bataille "revolution is the triumph of the irrational; for me the rational; for him a catastrophe; for me a methodical action in which everyone strives to limit the damages; for him the liberation of the instincts, particularly those generally considered pathological; for me the superiority of morality… How can we coexist in the same revolutionary organisation." What Weil misses here, is that Bataille is not so much a dismisser of the rational, to the contrary, Bataille recognises that if we take reason seriously, and push it to its limit, it cannot provide an account of itself. In other words, all projects of reason, ultimately, have an irrational base. By recognising this, we can articulate that reason, rather than belonging to a set separate from desire, is itself a subset within desire, one that is not in a relation of agony with desire, but is rather in a relation of agony with other elements, or subsets, of desire. Reason exists in a constitutively dictatorial plane - and it is precisely this power and claim to dictation that defines the moral imperatives characterising the ethical and political tendencies to which Simone Weil herself belongs. For Bataille, the problem of "dwelling" within a political organisation becomes incongruous, as once one has recognised the irrational base of the political, its status as a protean mask for the religious, the choice of axioms to which any political movement accords itself become irrelevant - the social logics ensuing from these axioms, their binding, rationalising, and bureaucratising mechanisms of control and conformity - the essence of their claim as a dictatorial claim remains the same. If Bataille argues then to "Abandon the world of the civilised and its light", this is only because the light of the civilised has exposed its own nature, its own lack of civility. If Bataille proclaims "It is too late to be reasonable and learned", then this isn't a claim based on a lost future, a task which other things being given could have been accomplished, it is a literal invocation to the awareness of what reason has revealed about itself with time - that is, its constitutive irrationality.
We encounter the material world as something in all instances grounded, grounded that is, in the agreement of action with certain physical laws - what we term the "laws of nature". Scientism, popular throughout the 19th century, and manifest in the 20th in the arms of logical positivism, invokes the image of the explanation of the world in this physical law. Yet, the problem remains, as Wittgenstein noted: "People stop at the laws of nature as if they were sacrosanct, like the ancients did at God and Fate. And they are both right - and wrong. The ancients were at least clearer insofar as they recognised a clear endpoint, while the new system tries to make it appear as if everything were explained." The limit-point of the confrontation of our knowledge, that is, the binding of the order of the world to the order of science, is the invocation of our moral reasoning, the view that an efficacious property of intention exists within action so that we can express a "will" a directed-ness towards the world. This will, we take to be unbounded, and so to enable us to act as morally accountable subjects without limit. Yet, by the former proposition, owing to the binding of the world to the order of science, all objects must thereby be determined by that law, and as we are objects of the world, we must be bonded to that law. Consequently, we have an incongruity, that which exists between our moral intuition of action, and by extension, our political programmes that instantiate the will, and the deductions of our knowledge, which assert the determinateness of our action in agreement with the limits of physical constraint. The explanandum for this incongruity is the invocation of a "third" object, the metaphysical object of spirit, which is by essence unbounded. This spirit, in the encounter of the person and nature, goes astray by attaching itself to a bounded thing, and this "going astray" is its dwelling in the earth, as considered in the aforementioned invocation of the term. All politics, to the degree that it considers the efficacious power of human conduct, invokes some instance of the "will", and hence, some unconscious axiom satisfying the notion of spirit. To this degree, all politics is a religious invocation, born in the error that is not the negation of the claim of reason, but the acknowledgment of its power, and by extension, the determination of its limit. This is the hangover of Wittgenstein's deliberation, what is left unexplained.
The Nietzschean element of Bataille proceeds from this, and it is that all senses of moral action, all senses of action viewed through a moral lens, appears to be a form of "intoxication", or "possession". It appears to be a property of the person, and yet assumes a determinate power over them. The hubris of Xerxes is not simply a property of the doomed king, it is an efficacious force, that invokes itself by drawing the Persians to complete a doomed expedition. Metaphor is the model of our understanding of the world. The "law of nature" itself attests to this, it is frame, a form, which we impose upon the objects of cognition, as Wittgenstein remarks, "The law of causality is not a law but the form of the law."* understood ultimately through the metaphor of sovereignty. The overcoming of the sovereign, in the image of the acephaly as a visual metaphor (cutting off the head of reason), can only be understood as the overcoming of the notion of ourselves as we implicate ourselves in the world, the overcoming of man altogether, the Nietzschean image of the Ubermensch. The concept of man is everywhere implicated in the concept of morality, the concept of morality implicated within the political notion of the "will" - the overcoming of man thereby cannot be a willed event, it must be the negation of the "will" properly conceived, and that is nothing other than the liberation of the unconscious from the fetters of reason - the fulfilment of the image of the Dionysiac. The resignation of reason to a subset of desire leads to the proper interpretation of reason as one actor amongst many in a play of agony, and it is this agonistic dynamic of rule and counter-rule, authority and counter-authority, ascension and descension of another part in turn, to which we, the concept of the "I", is an effect. The unity imposed upon the world, the ordered being of the world through which the frame of science imprints upon the world the image of unity, is in actuality nothing other than the condition of a particular manifestation of this metaphysical agony - the death of God - in the "I". This is what Nietzsche terms the "Will to Power", proclaiming: "this is my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery-world of the doubly voluptuous, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, if a goal does not lie in the happiness of the circle, without will, if a ring does not have good will for itself (…) This world is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourselves are also this will to power - and nothing else!"
The escape from the head is not its destruction, but its recognition and acknowledgment, and that is its superposing upon the seat of desire, the ass, the genitals. Reason, as a subset of desire, is the recognition of the sovereign denigrated from the power to rule - what remains on the adorned seat wearing the plaintiff robes is a jester, and gathered around them a game is being played, affirmed by the joint-participation of legions of the "mad" - this is the Dionysiac image of the world set free, a jester being worshipped and waited upon by an island of fools.
* Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus. Oxford University Press. 2023. Tr. Michael Beaney
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