From Contre-Attaque to Acéphale

From Tableaux vivants: Essais critiques 1936–1983 (Gallimard, 2001). Written July 1970. Translated by $eraph with the assistance of AI.

We could never have remained attached to one another — even through our oppositions — had there not been beforehand the shared familiarity of a single space where thought can simultaneously hold at a distance the most unusual objects that come to it and almost immediately — not “comprehend” them — but properly couple with them. (Whether this kind of coupling covers over the disarray of reason attentive to such objects, or whether it is due to the curiosity — irresistible in Bataille — for that moment of disarray as much as for the incongruity of what provokes it, I will not debate here.) The space where this plays out belongs, far from it, neither to philosophy, nor to science, nor to art, nor to religion, and yet — notwithstanding all pathological demarcation — presents itself as a singular architecture combining these four dimensions of affectivity, of the kind elaborated in the distant horizons of Gnosis and the great heresies; these remaining still the Model — and the share of delirium mixed into them only adds to their prestige — of a power of thought insurgent in this most forgotten form within the very context of the social convulsions provoked by the most recent ideological repressions. (The figure of the headless god Acéphale belongs to this order.)

Bataille exercised me in exploring this space more fully and, binding me to his own enterprises of the time, he taught me at the same time the kind of methodical obstinacy he himself brought to reproducing and articulating that share of affectivity in us most refractory to intelligible organization — the share which, under this pretext, we are led to betray by hastily integrating ourselves into orthodoxies of every kind, which serve for that otherwise unformulable part that history has deposited within us.

All of this, which is of a personal, intimate order and of very limited interest, does not seem to me foreign to Bataille’s conduct, to his proselytism with regard to what then passed for revolutionary positions and ultimatums. In conversation, he never expressed himself otherwise than discreetly, interrogatively, even as with a gesture he might have indicated his own vision — approaching it in a monastic tone, punctuated by the snicker of a cunning ogre, taking the time to assure himself that through what he was proposing practically, his interlocutor divined the reflection of what he has named “the unavowable” or “the impossible.” Not at all in the erotic sense, but in the sense of what seems to defy “common sense” — the deserted terrain of theology, perhaps (one cannot ignore the prior influence of Chestov) — and whose glimmer still fell on the terrain of economic and social norms as he conceived them. Nothing mad, however; nothing perverse in his nature — but a constant gaze upon these forms of self-decomposition as upon a double dimension going beyond what he decided to undertake. (The terms so frequent in his work — “horror,” “extreme misfortune,” “laughing to tears” — although his own states of soul surface in them — imposed themselves on his vocabulary when facing audiences suspected of hostility or uncertainty. Those of “derision” — of “derisory” in terms of efficacy or inefficacy — best characterize his confrontation with the Surrealists, and thus the period running from Contre-Attaque to Acéphale.)

During the first sessions of Contre-Attaque, Breton listened to him with a prudent receptivity, initially allowed himself a feeling of immediate solidarity, then sought to recover himself — sometimes perplexed — weighing Bataille’s words according to his own measures and according to the kind of code that seemed to reign in the numerous group surrounding him. A rather heteroclite group, with the exception of a few veteran disciples, at the moment Contre-Attaque coagulated, a few months before the Popular Front. Around this time, pure anarchists and Trotskyists came to mingle with socialists and syndicalists, forming a kind of “swamp” between Breton and Bataille that contributed to confusion and equivocation, including a number of German émigrés. The presence of these diverse elements necessarily influenced the choice of vocabulary, which tacked between excess and after-the-fact amendments.

During the debates, Breton remained dominated by a single scruple — and in this showed himself rational and humanitarian: to avoid at all costs giving the association, newly emerged from Surrealism, the slightest suspicion of any rupture with the egalitarian traditions of the workers’ movement — that is, with the spirit of the Commune.

It is inconceivable that Breton, knowing Bataille’s texts previously published in Critique sociale, could have imagined for an instant that he might assimilate him into his own project. From the outset, both perhaps illusioned themselves about the other’s aspirations and believed they were pursuing the same goal: contemplation and action — revolutionary because contemplative, contemplative because revolutionary. For Breton, contemplative experience sought social and therefore rational justification by identifying itself with the insurrectional action from without — for Bataille, contemplation is insurrection in itself. In both, the inversion of contemplation into insurrection and of insurrection into contemplation proceeds from mental operations too different for them not to leave to the aleatory amalgam of their respective groups the task of bringing their fundamental incompatibility to light.

Bataille, however, concerned himself with no coherence between his vision and the workers’ movement, nor above all with any obedience to egalitarian traditions. (He did not yet affirm, on another level, that Eros and social equity exclude one another.) How could insurrection ever exercise an “implacable authority”? It presupposes a degree of intensity that an anachronistic rationality could not sustain.

In itself, the rational would forbid forestalling the fait accompli by its very incapacity to provoke it. The fait accompli would proceed from a method of inconsequence such that it should be practiced with regard to positions always determined by the context of traditional ideologies — notably Marxism which, for Bataille at that time, resulted in organized impotence. For an association’s action to be effective, should it not take inconsequence and discontinuity as its rule? This is in substance what silently dictated Bataille’s conduct and generated a strange unease.

For a time, a mediating element between Breton and Bataille seemed to present itself in the person of Maurice Heine. He did not fail to literally bewitch us with his singular exterior of “Baron Saturn,” his imperturbable courtesy — himself incarnating the pure anarchism of The Ego and Its Own — and still more by his manner of evoking, even of rendering palpable, the physiognomy of Sade in the way only an intimate of the Marquis could have done. “He is one of the deaths I dread most,” Breton said of him to me. Maurice Heine, as soon as he made his voice heard, gave the crepuscular impression of a beyond speaking to good purpose. Of absolute pessimism, foreign to all exteriorization of anger, inclining in Bataille’s favor on more than one point, he nonetheless abstained from intervening at the final session — at the café de la Mairie, place Saint-Sulpice — that prepared the rupture and dissolution. Bataille was about to file for bankruptcy. His group was limited to some ten persons against Breton’s hundred, “descended in force from Montmartre,” as Bataille would later point out to me. He began to read in a flat voice, and as he had just introduced a sentence with “I regret having…” or “I have some remorse” — Breton, striking his fist on the table, interrupted him: “Regrets, remorse? That’s Christian, that! I did not expect such a loss of potential!” But nearly ten years later, in the days following the Liberation, at a lecture by Bataille at the Maspero bookshop where he was resuming his most violent affirmations, Breton would declare himself in agreement “with all his heart.”

From his failure with the already-constituted group of the Surrealists — failure of the attempt to provoke, if not a movement, at least an atmosphere whose law it was to endure only through ambiguity — the schema of Acéphale nonetheless emerged.

Ambiguity itself cannot properly assign itself any defined goal in advance — such as those that existed at Contre-Attaque, lending themselves immediately to recuperation from without. It can suffice unto itself only if it represents itself, for those who maintain it, through a figure that disconcerts interpretation and expresses the kind of bi-polarity that Bataille was already experiencing: authority-insurrection; contemplation-exercise of power (Nietzsche). Finally it organizes itself as a “movement for movement’s sake,” even with the apparent rituality of a secret, “initiatory” society. I do not claim that Acéphale was only that: I will say that — even if one should note a share of childishness in it — Bataille recognized himself in it precisely for that reason.

For a long time, and still in the days after the war, he had to defend himself against the misinterpretations and exclusions to which he was subject — his being called into question by Sartre, notably — and this anxious need to react to the various alternatives of Parisian strategy, incommensurable with what he glimpsed, would cost him a considerable expenditure of energy; this “dissipation” is likewise inseparable from his destiny. But I will attribute it to his encounter with Maurice Blanchot, to their friendship which was as beneficial as possible for him, that he recognized in total incommunicability the condition from which a true action can then be exercised.

July 1970