巴塔耶的消极活力论
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/batailles-negative-vitalism/
Bataille’s Negative Vitalism 巴塔耶的消极活力论
Posted on April 28, 2019 发表于2019 年 4 月 28 日




Georges Bataille populates his writings with the imagery of torture and murder. His fiction revels in sexual assault. He speaks of evil as having a sovereign value for humanity. He speaks of there being intimacy between the sacrificers and the victims in human sacrificial rituals. He compares sex to human sacrifice. He describes himself meditating on photos of a man being dismembered and recounts his ecstatic experiences of joy and anguish in doing so, going so far as to call the wounded victim beautiful. He holds forth violation and transgression as things that reveal our true nature. 乔治·巴塔耶的作品中充斥着酷刑和谋杀的意象。他的小说热衷于性侵犯。他说邪恶对人类具有至高无上的价值。他谈到在人类祭祀仪式中,祭祀者和受害者之间存在着亲密的关系。他将性比作活人祭祀。他描述自己正在沉思一名男子被肢解的照片,并讲述了他在这样做时的喜悦和痛苦的欣喜若狂的经历,甚至称受伤的受害者是美丽的。他认为侵犯和过犯是揭示我们真实本性的事情。
– Stephen Bush, Sovereignty and Cruelty Self-Affirmation, Self-Dissolution, and the Bataillean Subject ——史蒂芬·布什, 《主权与残酷》、《自我肯定、自我瓦解和巴塔耶主题》
Sometimes I think critics are shocked by Bataille. What’s even more interesting is for all their delving into Bataille’s thought they forget he is the last great decadent, a late Romantic in the line that stretches from Baudelaire to Ratchilde and beyond… as Paglia emphasizes, 有时我认为批评者对巴塔耶感到震惊。更有趣的是,他们在深入研究巴塔耶的思想时忘记了他是最后一位伟大的颓废派,是从波德莱尔到拉特柴尔德乃至更远的家族中的晚期浪漫主义者……正如帕格利亚所强调的那样,
“Decadent art is ritualistic and epiphanic. Its content: Romantic sexual personae, the hierarchs, idolators, and victims of daemonic nature. Even depicting episodes from poetry, Decadent art is never mere illustration. It dramatizes dominant western image and sexual subordination of the aggressive eye. Decadent art makes hostile claims on the viewer. Its style is pagan spectacle and pagan flaunting. Behind the trashiest Decadent painting are complex Romantic assumptions about nature and society overlooked by textbook accounts of nineteenth-century art.”1 “颓废艺术是仪式性的和顿悟的。它的内容是:浪漫的性人物、统治者、偶像崇拜者和恶魔本质的受害者。即使描绘诗歌中的情节,颓废艺术也绝不仅仅是插图。它戏剧化地表现了西方的主导形象和侵略性眼睛的性从属地位。颓废艺术对观众提出敌意的主张。它的风格是异教奇观和异教炫耀。在最垃圾的颓废绘画背后,是关于自然和社会的复杂的浪漫主义假设,而这些假设被十九世纪艺术教科书的描述所忽视。”1
Let’s face it Bataille was a true Sadean, whose life like Rimbaud sought to dissolve the Subject-Agent in the impersonal, and like his Gnostic forbears he used the extremes of ascetic and libertine excess to awaken that inner sense of ecstatic terror and horror of existence to produce an aesthetics of pleasure-pain; one based not on lack and need (Lacan), but rather on excess (Blakean) and transgressive intelligence and will (in the Nietzschean sense of Will-to-Power) . For Bataille, like Blake, evil is energy – the absolute vitality of the will-to-destruction that one sees in Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Balzac’s criminal vitalist, Vautrin, and Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror… One could even return to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, whose destructive vitalism overpowered six of her husbands, sending them all to that dark cadaverous world of zero. But unlike those vitalist harbingers, Bataille’s vitalism is born of absolute negativity rather than any positive energetic libidinalism; no, Bataille dissolved energy in an entropic vat of self-lacerating annihilation beyond which there could be nothing left but nothingness and the abyss. Bataille like other decadents would descend into the maelstrom, the womb of archaic night. Man, infantilized, is entombed in mother nature’s bower, the ultimate Decadent closure. Nature gives and nature takes away, letting her curtain fall upon her self-sacrificial son, whose ultimate sovereignty and sacrifice is self-immolation. 让我们面对现实吧,巴塔耶是一个真正的萨德主义者,他的一生就像兰波一样,试图将主体代理消解在非个人中,并且像他的诺斯替教先辈一样,他利用禁欲主义和放荡的极端来唤醒内心狂喜的恐惧和对存在的恐惧。产生一种快乐与痛苦的美学;一种不是基于缺乏和需要(拉康),而是基于过度(布莱克)和越界的智力和意志(尼采意义上的权力意志)。对于巴塔耶来说,就像布莱克一样,邪恶就是能量——人们在莎士比亚的《福斯塔夫》 、巴尔扎克的犯罪活力论者沃特林和洛特雷阿蒙伯爵的《马尔多罗》中看到的毁灭意志的绝对活力……人们甚至可以回到乔叟的《巴斯之妻》,破坏性的生机论压倒了她的六个丈夫,将他们全部送入了那个黑暗、苍白的零世界。但与那些活力论先驱不同的是,巴塔耶的活力论源于绝对的消极性,而不是任何积极的、充满活力的力比多主义。不,巴塔耶将能量溶解在一个自我毁灭的熵桶中,除了虚无和深渊之外,什么也没有留下。巴塔耶像其他颓废者一样,会坠入漩涡,即古老夜晚的子宫。人类被婴儿化了,被埋葬在大自然的凉亭里,这是最终的颓废封闭。自然给予,自然索取,让她的自我牺牲的儿子落下帷幕,而他的最终主权和牺牲就是自焚。
As a student of Nietzsche, Bataille understood the ‘art of cruelty’ all too well. If we take a look at Nietzsche’s notions concerning cruelty we begin to see a conceptual fabric emerge (below some notes and quotes from Beyond Good and Evil): 作为尼采的学生,巴塔耶非常了解“残酷的艺术”。如果我们看一下尼采关于残酷的观念,我们开始看到一种概念结构的出现(下面是《超越善恶》的一些注释和引述):
There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best – this sort of phenomenon can be found in the sacrifice of the firstborn (a practice shared by all prehistoric religions), as well as in Emperor Tiberius’ sacrifice in the Mithras grotto on the Isle of Capri, that most gruesome of all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their “nature,” to their god; the joy of this particular festival shines in the cruel eyes of the ascetic, that enthusiastic piece of “anti-nature.” Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? In the end, didn’t people have to sacrifice all comfort and hope, everything holy or healing, any faith in a hidden harmony or a future filled with justice and bliss? Didn’t people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves? To sacrifice God for nothingness – that paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty has been reserved for the race that is now approaching: by now we all know something about this. – 宗教残酷有一个巨大的阶梯,在它的许多梯级中,三级是最重要的。人们过去常常向他们的神献祭,甚至可能牺牲他们最爱的人——这种现象可以在长子的祭祀(所有史前宗教都有的做法)以及提比略皇帝的祭祀中找到。在卡普里岛的密特拉斯石窟中,这是所有罗马时代错误中最可怕的地方。然后,在人类的道德时代,人们向他们的神牺牲了他们拥有的最强烈的本能,即他们的“本性”;这个特殊节日的欢乐在苦行者残酷的眼神中闪耀,这是“反自然”的热情之作。最后:还有什么可以牺牲的呢?最后,人们难道不必须牺牲所有的安慰和希望,一切神圣或治愈的东西,任何对隐藏的和谐或充满正义和幸福的未来的信仰吗?人们不正是出于对自己的残酷而必须牺牲上帝本人并崇拜岩石、愚蠢、重力、命运或虚无吗?为了虚无而牺牲上帝——最终残酷的矛盾之谜已经为即将到来的种族保留了:到目前为止,我们都对此有所了解。 –
(BGE 86). (BGE 86)。
This is my claim: almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty. The “wild animal” has not been killed off at all; it is alive and well, it has just – become divine. Cruelty is what constitutes the painful sensuality of tragedy. And what pleases us in so-called tragic pity as well as in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate of metaphysical tremblings, derives its sweetness exclusively from the intervening component of cruelty. 这就是我的主张:几乎所有我们所谓的“高等文化”都是基于残酷的精神化和深化。 “野生动物”根本没有被消灭;它还活着,而且活得很好,它刚刚变得神圣。残酷构成了悲剧的痛苦感性。在所谓的悲剧性怜悯以及一切崇高事物中,直到最高最微妙的形而上学颤抖中,我们所喜悦的东西,都完全来自于残酷的介入成分。
…
We clearly need to drive out the silly psychology of the past; the only thing this psychology was able to teach about cruelty was that it originated from the sight of another’s suffering. But there is abundant, overabundant pleasure in your own suffering too, in making yourself suffer, – and wherever anyone lets himself be talked into self-denial in the religioussense, or self-mutilation (as the Phoenicians or ascetics did), or into desensitization, disembowelment or remorse in general, or into puritanical penitential spasms, vivisections of conscience or a Pascalian sacrifizio dell’intelletto– wherever this is the case, he is secretly being tempted and urged on by his cruelty, by that dangerous thrill of self-directed cruelty. Finally, people should bear in mind that even the knower, by forcing his spirit to know against its own inclination and, often enough, against the wishes of his heart (in other words, to say “no” when he would like to affirm, love, worship), this knower will prevail as an artist of cruelty and the agent of its transfiguration. Even treating something in a profound or thorough manner is a violation, a wanting-to-hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces, – there is a drop of cruelty even in every wanting-to-know. 我们显然需要消除过去的愚蠢心理;这种心理学能够教导的关于残忍的唯一一件事是,它源于对他人痛苦的看到。但是,在你自己的痛苦中,在让自己受苦的过程中,也有丰富的、过多的快乐——无论何时,只要有人让自己陷入宗教意义上的自我否定,或者自残(就像腓尼基人或苦行僧那样),或者变得麻木不仁, 、一般的剖腹或悔恨,或进入清教徒式的忏悔痉挛、良心活体解剖或帕斯卡式牺牲dell'intelletto1——无论在什么情况下,他都在暗中受到他的残忍的诱惑和推动,受到自我导向的残酷的危险刺激。最后,人们应该记住,即使是认识者,也会强迫他的精神违背自己的意愿,而且常常违背他内心的意愿(换句话说,当他想要肯定时说“不”),爱、崇拜),这个认识者将作为残酷的艺术家及其变形的代理人而盛行。即使以深刻或彻底的方式对待某件事也是一种侵犯,是一种想要伤害精神的基本意志,它不断地倾向于表面和表面——即使在每一个想要知道的地方,也有一点残酷。
(BGE 229). (BGE 229)。
…the spirit’s not quite harmless willingness to deceive other spirits and to act a part in front of them belongs here too, that constant stress and strain of a creative, productive, mutable force. What the spirit enjoys here is its multiplicity of masks and its artfulness, and it also enjoys the feeling of security these provide, – after all, its Protean arts are the very things that protect and conceal it the best! – This will to appearances, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to surfaces – since every surface is a cloak – meets resistance from that sublime tendency of the knower, who treats and wants to treat things in a profound, multiple, thorough manner. This is a type of cruelty on the part of the intellectual conscience and taste, and one that any brave thinker will acknowledge in himself, assuming that he has spent as long as he should in hardening and sharpening his eye for himself, and that he is used to strict discipline as well as strict words. ......这种精神并不是完全无害的愿意欺骗其他精神并在他们面前扮演角色也属于这里,一种创造性的、富有成效的、可变的力量的持续压力和压力。灵魂在这里享受的是它的多重面具和它的艺术性,它也享受这些提供的安全感,——毕竟,它千变万化的艺术正是最好的保护和隐藏它的东西! – 这种对表象、对简化、对面具、对斗篷的意志,简而言之,对表面的意志——因为每一个表面都是斗篷——遇到了认识者崇高倾向的抵制,认识者以深刻的、多重的方式对待并想要对待事物,彻底的方式。这是知识分子良心和品味的一种残忍行为,任何勇敢的思想家都会在自己身上承认这一点,假设他已经花了足够多的时间来使自己的眼光变得坚强和敏锐,并且他是习惯于严格的纪律和严厉的言辞。
(BGE 230). (BGE 230)。
Those three forms of religious cruelty that underpin the human: sacrifice to God; self-sacrificial mortification of instincts by way of acedia,and the ultimate sacrifice of God himself as the gate to nihilism and absolute freedom from the dominion of the Absolute. This sense of tragic cruelty at the core of all higher cultural praxis, a heroic core of sublime acceptance, of amor fati: the primal joy in the tragic “love of one’s fate” to all eternity, the fatalism of eternal recurrence as one’s right and justification, one’s honesty toward the cruelty at the heart of Being and becoming forever. Yet, this is not some passive fatalism, rather it is the active acknowledgement of the creative force at the heart of things, a cold hardening of the intellect in the face of the monstrousness of existence. 支撑人类的三种宗教残酷形式:向上帝献祭;通过绝望的方式对本能进行自我牺牲的禁欲,以及上帝本人的最终牺牲,作为通向虚无主义和摆脱绝对统治的绝对自由的大门。这种悲剧残酷感是所有高级文化实践的核心,是崇高接受的英雄核心,命运之爱:对永恒的悲剧性“对命运的热爱”中的原始喜悦,永恒轮回作为一个人的权利和命运的宿命论。正当性,一个人对存在和永恒存在的核心残酷性的诚实。然而,这并不是某种被动的宿命论,而是对事物核心创造力的主动承认,是面对存在的怪物时智力的冷酷硬化。
It’s this subtle ‘Art of Cruelty’ that Bataille would see in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as well, a communication beyond words, a figural dance of flesh and bitter-sweet honesty, the masked creativeness of unbounded cruelty. What Artaud primarily means by cruelty is “rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.” Such determination is in service of a “blind appetite for life capable of overriding everything” in its aim to wake people up—jolt them out of complacency—and put them in touch with vital forces of creativity that cannot but upend settled patterns of thought and conduct.2 巴塔耶在阿尔托的残酷剧场中也看到了这种微妙的“残酷艺术”,一种超越语言的交流,一场肉体的形象舞蹈和苦乐参半的诚实,以及无限残酷的面具创造力。阿尔托所说的残酷主要是指“严格、毫不动摇的意图和决定、不可逆转的绝对决心”。这种决心服务于“对生活的盲目渴望,能够压倒一切”,其目的是唤醒人们——让他们摆脱自满——并让他们接触到创造力的重要力量,而这种创造力只能颠覆既定的思维模式和模式。行为.2
Are the Sadean cruelty that Maurice Blanchot would uncover in his essays on the divine Marquise. One of the principal points about Sadean cruelty that Blanchot wants to make is that whereas in Sade cruelty finds its initial expression in the actions and impulses of people who gratify their own desires with total disregard for the suffering they inflict on others, the ultimate goal is to become so committed to cruelty and crime that one acts not for self-gratification but for the sake of cruelty as an end in itself. This is the height of cruelty, cruelty for the sake of cruelty, even when it destroys not just the victim but the perpetrator too. (ibid., 42) 莫里斯·布朗肖将在他关于神圣侯爵夫人的文章中揭露萨德式的残酷行为。布朗肖想要阐述的关于萨德残酷的主要观点之一是,萨德的残酷最初表现在人们完全无视自己给他人造成的痛苦而满足自己欲望的人的行为和冲动中,但最终目标是变得如此致力于残忍和犯罪,以至于一个人的行为不是为了自我满足,而是为了残忍本身的目的。这是残忍的顶峰,为了残忍而残忍,即使它不仅摧毁了受害者,也摧毁了肇事者。 (同上,42)
For Bataille the art of cruelty was based on destruction, aforce that disrupts us from our settled patterns of conduct, thought, and emotion. It desensitizes us from our cultural worldview, from the ideological structures that bind us, enslave us to the orthodoxy and dominion of the real. In many ways it is a form of de-programming our reality matrix, of cutting through the reality studio (Burroughs) and exposing the chaos of the true world outside our cultural prison. As Bush puts it Bataille seeks to break out of the prison house of culture and attain sovereignty: “Bataille understands sovereignty to be a condition in which one is subject to no external authority: neither the authority of persons, institutions, texts, norms, or laws.” (NE, 44) 对于巴塔耶来说,残酷的艺术是建立在破坏的基础上的,这是一种破坏我们既定的行为、思想和情感模式的力量。它使我们对我们的文化世界观、对束缚我们、奴役我们的正统观念和现实统治的意识形态结构脱敏。从很多方面来说,它是一种对我们的现实矩阵进行去编程的形式,是一种穿过现实工作室(巴勒斯)并揭露我们文化监狱之外的真实世界的混乱的形式。正如布什所说,巴塔耶寻求冲破文化的牢笼并获得主权:“巴塔耶将主权理解为一种不受外部权威约束的状态:既不受个人、机构、文本、规范或其他权威的约束。法律”。 (东北,44)
In Sovereignty, Bataille explicates the concept in these terms: it is that which is “opposed to the servile and the subordinate.” The sovereign “does not depend on anything.” The sovereign is the one who refuses to submit. Sovereignty is “the negation of prohibition.” Above all else, to be sovereign is to be in a state in which one is not a means to an end. Not to others’ ends and not to one’s own future ends. To be sovereign is to be in the present moment, subject to nothing and no one else. (NE, 45). 巴塔耶在《主权》中用这样的术语解释了这个概念:它是“与奴役和从属相对立的”。主权“不依赖任何东西”。君主就是拒绝服从的人。主权是“对禁令的否定”。最重要的是,主权就是处于一种状态,在这种状态下,一个人不是达到目的的手段。不为他人的目的,也不为自己未来的目的。拥有主权就是活在当下,不受制于任何事物,也不受制于任何人。 (东北,45)。
One coming on Bataille’s writings for the first time might see this tendency for cruelty as self-contradictory. How can one be at once self-denying and self-affirming? This affirmation of cruelty that leads one toward both self-destruction and creativity seems at best a fool’s game. But is it? As Bush reminds us, 第一次接触巴塔耶作品的人可能会认为这种残忍的倾向是自相矛盾的。一个人怎样才能同时自我否定和自我肯定呢?这种对残酷的肯定会导致人们走向自我毁灭和创造力,这充其量似乎是一场傻瓜游戏。但真的是这样吗?正如布什提醒我们的那样,
Bataille’s aim is not to offer specific instructions on how to live. His aim is to shape the subject for and through ecstatic experiences. These experiences are ends in themselves for Bataille, but in my reading, the ecstatic experiences shape people’s character for their social lives when they have exited ecstasy. And for that process, he thinks what is called for is exposure to the extremes. Bataille wants ecstasy to expose the subject to extreme forces of absolute self-denial and absolute self-affirmation. Th e result is to bring about lasting changes in the subject so formed. 巴塔耶的目的不是提供如何生活的具体指导。他的目标是通过欣喜若狂的体验来塑造主题。对于巴塔耶来说,这些经历本身就是目的,但在我看来,狂喜的经历塑造了人们在退出狂喜后的社交生活性格。他认为,对于这个过程,需要的是暴露在极端条件下。巴塔耶希望狂喜使主体暴露在绝对自我否定和绝对自我肯定的极端力量之下。其结果是给如此形成的主题带来持久的变化。
(NE, 48). (东北,48)。
It’s this refusal of subservience that is the key to both cruelty and sovereignty in Bataille’s thought. This form of cruelty seeks to overcome the law of sacrifice that was the religious praxis, for religious cruelty sought the dominion and subjection of sovereignty over others in the name of the Orthodoxy. Rather for Bataille the art of cruelty does not seek the subservience of the other but its release into sovereignty. This is the task of the cruelty of freedom. No longer bound to God or Man the sovereign individual stands amidst his fellows cold, cruel, and alone; and, yet, in this solitude is attained that intimacy of communication such as was never attained under the dominion and tyranny of communal habit and custom. 在巴塔耶的思想中,这种对屈从的拒绝是残酷和主权的关键。这种形式的残忍试图克服宗教实践中的牺牲法则,因为宗教残忍寻求以东正教的名义对他人进行统治和服从。相反,对于巴塔耶来说,残酷的艺术并不寻求他人的屈从,而是将其释放为主权。这就是自由的残酷任务。主权个体不再受上帝或人类的束缚,站在他的同伴中间,冷酷、残酷、孤独;然而,在这种孤独中却获得了在公共习惯和习俗的统治和专制下从未获得过的亲密交流。
(This post is already too long, but one will need to understand what Bataille meant by ‘intimacy’ to understand both the notions of sovereignty and communication. I’ll address that at some future time…) (这篇文章已经太长了,但是人们需要理解巴塔耶所说的“亲密”意味着什么,才能理解主权和沟通的概念。我将在将来的某个时候解决这个问题……)