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GEORGES BATAILLE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Foreword, by David Farrell Krell..........................ixPreface to the English Edition............................xviiIntroduction: Subsidiary Developments.....................11 Mythological Representation.............................272 The Logic of Phantasm...................................1113 The Signs of the Phantasmatic Text......................1674 "Hegel against the Immutable Hegel".....................2385 Phenomenology and Phantasmatology.......................277Notes.....................................................287Bibliography..............................................317Index.....................................................325

Chapter One

1. Reversal

From old—and indeed extremely ancient—times there has been handed down to our later age intimations of a mythical character to the effect that the stars are gods and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The further details were subsequently added in the manner of myth. Their purpose was the persuasion of the masses and general legislative and political expediency. For instance, the myths tell us that these gods are anthropomorphic or resemble some of the other animals and give us other, comparable extrapolations of the basic picture. If, then, we discard these accretions and consider the central feature, that they held the primary substances to be gods, we might well believe the claim to have been directly inspired. We might also conclude that, while it is highly probable that all possible arts and doctrines have been many times discovered and lost, these ancient cosmologies have been preserved, like holy relics, right up to the present day. It is these, and these alone, that we can know clearly of the ancestral—indeed primordial—beliefs. —Aristotle

What sort of a new under water boat ride; and what new spyglasses are to be invented for this vast domain? —Johann Gottfried Herder

If thought once attains power sufficient to give existence to itself within itself and in its element, the myth becomes a superfluous adornment, by which Philosophy is not advanced. —G. W. F. Hegel

Right at the very beginning of Bataille's text that we will attempt to read here, we encounter the following terms: "mythic," "mythological," "myth," and "mythology." In order to be able to grasp the organizational role of these terms within the texts into which they have been woven, and in order to be able to decide if "myth" functions here as a concept or only as a signifier, it is necessary to briefly outline the Romantic concept of myth, which has been presupposed without exception by all later efforts to think the mythical. The Romantic concept of myth, just like that of German Idealism, indicates a turn that appears to have reversed the hierarchy of myth and logos that had been valid up to that point. Jean Bollack describes this turn in the following way:

While ever since Aristotle myth had appeared to be the corrupted form of an always already revealed truth, a form of forgetting or intentional veiling that philosophy once again sublates, for Romanticism myth counts as something primary and undetermined. Thus, philosophy becomes for Romanticism the explicator of this myth whose mysterious original truth it translates into a more controlled, more precise, and for this reason also poorer language.

Generally speaking, in the following short presentation of the relation of myth and logos by the Greeks we will follow Bollack's explanations.

According to Bollack, Aristotle, who based himself most likely on Plato's doxographic speculations in Timaeus and Critias, presupposes another age that is anterior not only to the present age but also to mythical times. This "Saturnine Age," or "divine age of true theology," which has been destroyed by a cataclysm, is an age that is in full possession of true knowledge concerning the divine, in short, of philosophy. Needless to say, with the catastrophic end of this age the science of the divine that characterized it is lost and is followed by a time of forgetting. Yet, according to Bollack's reading of Aristotle (and Plato), "the legacy of this age, although fragmented and distorted, still contains enough truth to be incorporated into mythological thought, and to be able to bring forth again philosophy through the adjustment of reflection."

According to Aristotle, before the epistemological efforts of philosophy at progressively rediscovering the truths of the Saturnine Age, the myths of the poets are the first to take up the remaining traces of the lost science. Although the poets are the guardians of the philosophical heritage of the age of true theology, they also clothe, and thus disguise, it in mythopoetical ways. In other words, myths are only transitional figures between prehistorical knowledge and the world of posterity. They, therefore, represent something that after the loss of the oldest revelation of truth was added to it, and that is again to be cast off in the parousia of the Saturnine Age. In other words, according to this conception, myth itself is not a preform of philosophy but only a recipient in which something that is heterogeneous to it, that is, the traces of philosophy as it existed in the Saturnine Age, is preserved. Truth in myth is not something that intrinsically belongs to it.

But Plato and Aristotle view the return of the knowledge of the Saturnine Age differently. For Plato, the theology in question can come to a reactualizing completion only beyond the epoch that remains suspended between past and future. A fully accomplished philosophy—which for Plato arises also from myth and restores prehistorical knowledge to its full plenitude—is not possible either in myth or in philosophy but only beyond them. By contrast, according to Bollack, "the nature of Aristotelian metaphysics forbids it to search for the fulfillment of an original theology beyond itself." Its own epistemological efforts at rediscovering the lost heritage are indeed its progressive realization.

Whereas for Plato perfection is banned from the world that we live in and is displaced into the beyond of the universe, for Aristotle the idea of the divine survives the demise of philosophical knowledge in such a way that the newly emerging philosophy can divest it of the mantle that mythopoetical activity has dressed it in so as to develop it until its new completion in this world. This is possible because for Aristotle the heterogeneity of mythology and philosophy is contained in the mysterious element of myth like a seed, as it were, yet, as we have already seen, "the 'philosophical' element, that is, the truth in myth, does not for its part belong to the myth itself." Indeed, the fact that philosophy at its first emergence appears in the form of the mythical, as is to some extent the case with the pre-Socratics, does not at all deny its autonomy and its essential independence from myth. To the contrary, philosophy is from the very beginning a disposition that with its first appearance has already subjected myth to itself. Philosophy—just like science standing by its side—does not originate from a gradual rationalization of mythical thinking. It immediately ties itself to the idea of the divine, which is presented...