Prometheus Dismembered: Bataille on Van Gogh, or
The Window in the Bataille Restaurant
James Luchte
I will begin my address with a minor coincidence.
The Window of the Bataille Restaurant, sketched with pencil in Paris in 1887, shows us a
typical Van Gogh scenario, a table with a chair, setting in front of a window, which not only
reveals the (framed) world outside, but also lets the soft light into the space of the restaurant.
We can see Van Gogh’s hat and coat hanging on the wall by the window. We can also see
two men below outside on the street.
In general, the painting is quite dark, except for the intensity of the window and the motes of
light that it channels onto the chair and table and the one who stands where he stands, in the
position of the artist. Yet,
this does not in itself
disclose the coincidence.
That it is a window in
namely
the
Bataille
restaurant is where the
coincidence comes into
view since today I came to
talk with you upon the
theme of light in Bataille’s
interpretation of Van Gogh
– yet, at the same time,
there is a painting by Van
Gogh with a central motif
of light, and in reference to
the name of Bataille. Of
course, to give any real
significance to such a
coincidence, even if it is
one, is, one would usually
argue, merely faulty logic,
fuelled by superstitious
thinking, by the fatalism of
synchronicity.
The Bataille Restaurant in
fact has nothing to do with
Georges
Bataille,
the
philosopher whose work I
am considering today. He
neither was connected to it
in any family or financial
sense, nor does he mention
the sketch in his writings on Van Gogh. Nevertheless, it could still be the title of my address
as it contains within itself as a title poetically the theme of the address, which is light in the
art of Van Gogh, and as is understood from the perspective of Bataille. It could be argued
that it is the poetic license of example, motif, or symbol chosen to orient the discussion, the
title of an artwork already indexed to the thematic and name of the interpreter under
consideration. The strength of such a title, as a formal indication, is its ability to disclose the
truth of the matter at hand, as it is with the artwork in Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work
of Art’ (1936).
But, this, it will be countered is the manner of thinking of the artist, mystic or lunatic.
Yet, each of these types could be attributed to Van Gogh or perhaps to any creative being.
His religious mission to bring light to the poor, to the people, is the thinking of the magician,
of the sorcerer who can guide the destiny of the world: the way of thinking of the artist. His
obsessive alcohol and opium fuelled painting binges were guided by his wish to give a new
sensibility to the people, to give light to those trapped in the factories or the coal mines. But,
such a symbolic mission inevitably becomes political, and has become political with the
emergence of the labour and socialist, communist movements at the turn of the last century
and in the decades leading to the Bataille of my address, in his own confrontation with the
dark captivity of a world on the brink of fascism.
Van Gogh himself never became overtly political, but spoke of such matters in his letters to
his brother Theo. Instead, he engaged in intense periods of artistic activity - at one point
living with Gauguin - punctuated by bouts of madness, during which he remained creative,
even when institutionalised. Much of the chaos in his life was related to his abuse of alcohol,
specifically absinthe, and his probable addiction to opium, which diminishes appetite and
promotes dissociation from the everyday world.
It is Bataille who takes poetic license in his attempts to make Van Gogh political, calling him
Prometheus (and despite Eric Michaud’s objections, in his ‘Van Gogh, or The Insufficiency
of Sacrifice,’ which beg the question by considering Prometheus only in his heroic aspect),
the Titan god who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the creatures he himself had created.
For this transgression, we will recall, Prometheus is sentenced by Zeus to be chained to a
rock and each day to have his liver devoured by a vulture. At night, the liver would grow
back, only to have the bird return the next day, and forever. The democratic dimension of
Van Gogh’s work has become standard in any consideration of his significance.
Bataille invites us to consider Van Gogh, wearing the mask of Prometheus, on two occasions,
in 1930 and 1937, with his ‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh’
and ‘Van Gogh as Prometheus’, respectively. In each instance, the text is preceded by a
rupture with Breton: the castigation of ‘M. Bataille’ in the Second Surrealist Manifesto, who,
it is prophesied, would eventually submit to Hegel;; and the dissolution of Contre-Attaque
amidst the occult conjuration of the secret society Acephalae.
In the former instance (1930), Bataille sets against Bretonian purity, and that which he
considered feigned madness, a deathly erotic vision of catastrophe, of an indigestible sacred.
In the latter moment (1937), Bataille and his cohorts seek to bring about their vision of an
existential war against fascism, one whose weapons are not those of the Icarian
sublimations/sublations of Breton, but of the Promethean de-sublimation (exposure,
subversion and erosion) of vast and myriad homogeneities.
Prometheus accepts his punishment and does not seek redemption. For Bataille, there is no
Prometheus Unbound in the ways of Aeschylus and Shelley. God is dead. There remains only
hegemony and resistance. Hegemony is the profane homogeneity of the restricted economy,
while resistance is the sacred heterogeneity of the general economy.
Van Gogh brought light to the people, but he also experienced the dismemberment of flesh,
self-sacrifice, prophesy (‘keep this, it will be important one day’), and the overwhelming
slippage of death. With the dismemberment of the god, the sacrifice of Prometheus, the
freedom of creation and the power to cast light upon the fragile truth of the world is given to
all human beings, without exception. But, each must take the risk of his or her own license,
thereby achieving sovereignty.
Bataille wallows in filth for a reason: filth is outside of fascism and totalitarian consciousness
- it is the seed of resistance in its very abjection. Icarus loves the sun too much, seeks to
emulate Helios, the watcher of all, the god of surveillance, of the total state machine. Breton,
who lives in an invisible house (Nadja), is bewitched with Hegel who claims to have thought
the panoptic thoughts of god before creation.
Bataille hides in the shadows, in the pseudonym, the text with no face, debauched, useless for
the purposes of fascism.
Van Gogh also abides amidst these shadows, equally useless or even harmful to the purposes
of aggressive idealisation. He swills among the heterogeneous, sacred economy, the tragic
community. His self-mutilation, an event, a dismemberment of self, is a breach, sacred, a
laceration of the unquestioned ‘time-line’, the so-called history.
The Promethean aspect emerges, in the first instance, with paintings of stars and sunflowers,
of the marvel of the cosmos in its intimacy. In the second instance, Van Gogh, not mentioned
in the Surrealist Manifestos (and this is surely one of the reasons Bataille chose Van Gogh as
his patron artist), captures and transfigures the sun, the celestial lights, into the earth, as a
shamanic gift for the people.
Light dances across life, caresses the leaves, fields of wheat eclipse the stars. His
Promethean transgression against Zeus is an incitement toward an explosion, a flame
illuminating an an-archic openness. The awakening to the celestial marvellous of Saint-Rémy
is surmounted by the diabolic conjuration of light from darkness, a remembrance of the birth
of the sky from the earth. Life dances upon the earth, flesh is enlightened, darkness is
imbued with light, awakened in the people amidst Van Gogh’s sacred anarchism.
The State and Revolution
Breton predicts that Bataille will succumb to Hegel, and to the discipline inherent in postLeninist left-wing organisations. Bataille did not fit into Breton’s world – instead he remains
as Diogenes, who seeks an honest man, but, in this case, finds a surrealist. In fact, Bataille
was very aware of his own relationship to Hegel. Indeed, his own philosophy of nonknowledge emerged through his resistance to Hegel’s economy of absolute knowledge.
Moreover, this resistance to the Absolute is carried over into the political domain in three
essays from around 1933, which is the year of the ascension of Hitler: ‘The State’, ‘The
Psychological Structure of Fascism’, and ‘The Notion of Expenditure’.
These essays, as a group, serve as a response to Breton, and as an attack upon fascism,
communism and Americanism, which were for Bataille, variations of the same statist
homogenising operations of the military, the government, the material economy and the
church (propaganda ministry). Each of these is dominated by a restricted economy of power.
Bataille unearths, through his non-knowledge, that which exceeds absolute knowledge, and
from the perspective of a sovereign discourse, re-contextualises absolute knowledge as a
restricted economy within a broader, general economy. This is the outside of Hegel’s state,
outside the Polis of Plato – the homogeneous order has been established, but the poets are
still there, outside, in the dimension of heterogeneity, playing at the margins of philosophy.
And yet, perhaps the poets are better placed in the modern world as they have not yet been
sent outside the city walls. This being-inside the site of the homogenising operations, within
the total state machine, can serve as the place of the event, of the activity which exceeds or
challenges the mechanisms of power, surveillance, interdiction, judgment, incarceration – all
the features of the protocol of absolute knowledge, absolute power. (Edward Snowden)
Non-knowledge, the power of thought not restricted by the state, occurs in the general
economy, in the resistance to power, dissolution of the self in intoxication, eroticism, and in
the myriad other detours before death.
Or - in the dissolution of the state or some of its aspects – the state which is the indicator for
the homogenising operations of the military, government, corporations and the church (which
now could be expanded to include the culture industry as such, entertainment as religion).
That which must occur for Bataille are ungovernable Promethean de-sublimations of
homogeneity, a Great Night (which could be a cultural era such as the counter culture of the
1960’s, or the French Revolution), characterised by an exposure of a regime of power: to
delimit it, to describe it, to attempt to change it, and either attempt to take control of it (which
is the necessary illusion of democratic governments, as if they can control the vast array of
power and surveillance networks and mechanisms) or subvert the regimes of power until they
suffer collapse and eventual erosion, back into the general economy which will manifest ever
new forms of life and expressive existence.
Two examples of such de-sublimation come from the world of literature, perhaps the domain
in which the self is least at risk from such experiments. Yet, that is said with an air of
finality, as if nothing could any longer be shocking – we have arrived, we are free, no one
could be threatened for what they write... But, it was not that long ago when Allen Ginsberg,
our first example, had to go to court to defend Howl (1955) from charges of obscenity. In
winning the obscenity case, Ginsberg, the Jewish, communist, homosexual poet of the Beat
generation liberated us to the state we now take for granted, and which is always under threat.
Soon after the Ginsberg case, censorship laws, having been exposed in the trial, were struck
down, subverted, and have to a great extent eroded in their previous forms. Henry Miller, for
instance, was banned until Ginsberg prevailed, and Ginsberg himself was called as a
character witness for the obscenity trial of William Burroughs, for Naked Lunch. Censorship
remains a vital terrain of battle, and it goes without saying that there are enormous challenges
to free expression from restrictions on the internet, mass surveillance, and intellectual
property laws, not to mention the capitalist economy in the publishing and art industries.
My second example comes from Bataille himself. His stunning short novel The Story of the
Eye can be, to this day, a shocking read. By exposing the perversities and eccentricities of
the characters, he shatters the naivety of a homogenised consciousness, and as with Lacan’s
notion of the mirror stage, the Eye becomes indelibly marked upon the character of the world.
Bataille sought to subvert the rigid Roman Catholic codes, norms and sensibilities by
conjuring forth a world of innocently violent and perverse eroticism, terror, joy, humiliation,
and murder. However, since he published The Story of the Eye in a limited run under the
pseudonym Lord Auch, he was never called in to account for his alleged crimes like his hero
De Sade. The book remained in the shadows, in the underground, and has remained ever
since, in most places. Films of his books are being made, he is becoming one of the greats –
but what kind of culture would ever regard The Story of the Eye as ‘normal’?
A brief comparison between these two examples may shed light upon the best strategy for
subverting a regime of power. Ginsberg wanted to liberate his words and by implication,
liberate the cultural, political, and personal acts which he describes. His words were allowed,
as they were judged to be a legitimate form of art, with redeeming value. Some of the acts
have begun to gain traction as well, such as equality and marijuana legalisation, and this
manner of change works to modify the homogenous order, by local subversions or legislative
transformations. The homogeneity remains, but ceaselessly works to co-opt (the list is long)
or destroy an ascending heterogeneity, such as Malcolm X.
Bataille, on the other hand, was, as he said, debauched. One suspects that his interest in Van
Gogh lies mainly in the fact that he not only cut off his ear, but also went insane. But, such a
suspicion, while not altogether wrong, would be unfair as Bataille is seeking to change the
world, as Marx called on philosophers to do in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. But, his
method of meditation calls on those with ears to hear to remain in the shadows cultivating
one’s vice, to be free as that which is indigestible, incorporable, ungovernable, one which is
sovereign and secret.
It is thus in Blue of Noon (1957) that Bataille, written allegedly during the Spanish Civil War,
focussed almost exclusively upon the debauched character Dirty. While an activist is present,
this is certainly not The Just Assassins by Albert Camus. There is a sense in Bataille that the
activist is engaging in some circus down the road, to which he decided not to go. It is simply
not important, at least not as important as a debauched woman urinating on the chair in which
she sits. Both of the main characters are drunk, one possibly near death, and there is nearly a
taste of the unhygienic sexual chemistry of the protagonists.
Bataille does not want to get anyone’s hope up – indeed, that is the problem, for Bataille. As
the necessity of going down detours is the lot of mortal beings – detours on the way to death,
there is always a group or organisation or charismatic person who would be happy for you to
sacrifice your life for a fantasy – religion, nation, revolution, etc. Over time, industries have
been set up to process all of the detours, which now have been established as the various
types of life expenditure, life industries. We are produced by these industries, by the
hospital, the school, the military, religion, family, culture – we are a house of cards in which
the cards are made out of commodities - homogenous established units of life.
Bataille does not want to build anything up, not to store the grain or accumulate capital and
savings – he wants to expend resources in a flood of communal hedonism, the desire for
which would destroy the forms of homogeneity that curtailed the desires of the community
and its right to enjoy the fruits of its labour. Not to prepare, like the revolutionists and the
religious fanatics, for the great event, but to enjoy the world in the innocence of its givenness. The great event never comes, what does come, that is the battle.
It is the festival, as a social paradigm of de-sublimation, to which Bataille wishes us to
descend. We would still be conscious, still use tools, and still reproduce our existence, but
with the gift and not the commodity as the form of social relation, the sacred economy of
expenditure for all will be the motive of economic activity. It is in this way that Bataille and
Van Gogh share the same hopes for human beings, all human beings, and each acknowledge
the necessity that light be restored to the life of the people. Van Gogh sought to give light to
the people and to show them that anyone could be creative and that every life, every station is
aesthetically worth. Bataille sought to show us that we are freer than we even suspect and
that all things and situations will undergo transformation or destruction.
As for the strength of my title, perhaps we saw all of this through the window in Bataille’s
restaurant, which in the original French means a ‘restorative’ of one’s health and vigour.
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References and Further Reading
Georges Bataille, ‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,’ trans.
Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985), 61-72.
___________. (1930) 'Van Gogh as Prometheus', October, Vol. 36, Georges Bataille:
Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing (Spring, 1986), pp. 58-60.
Kirkpatrick, David (2005) Bataille and the Writing of Sacrifice, MSA 7 Seminar: Modernist
Excess, Chicago.
Michaud, Eric (1989) ‘Van Gogh, or The Insufficiency of Sacrifice,’ October, Vol. 49,
(Summer, 1989), pp. 25-39.