Rodolphe Gasché
Dé-lire: Bataille and the Delirium of Reading
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Let us begin our reading of Bataille’s text “The Pineal Eye” with an examination of the praxis of our reading. In order to be able to allow our reading to unfold itself in its complete and complex materiality, let us read the text in such a way that we do not fix our attention either on this or that theme or on this or that signifier. Reading with “evenly-suspended attention” (Freud, “Recommendations” 111), our objective is, as Lucette Finas has demonstrated in her amazing work on Madame Edwarda, “to resend the story to itself, if possible, excluding all external references with the exception of making it traverse myself; to detach and then reattach its retina. Nothing but its retina—the web of its noises” (19). Such a procedure is led by an economy of interpretation that renounces every profit (every extraction of meaning) that would come in the form of a surplus value from an investment of labor. To be more precise, it avoids every attempt at the constitution of a fixed meaning.
The question, then, concerns not only what makes such a reading of Bataille’s text possible but precisely what makes it necessary. First of all, it definitely calls for a certain set of themes staged by Bataille: not in the least, the theme of an economy of expenditure of riches as well as of meaning. But this theme does not yet constitute a sufficient ground for a reading of this nature, since a thematic interpretation implies that the reader can break down the text into its complexes of meaning and sense, which could then be grasped in a profit-oriented interpretation as the sense, the statement, or the meaning of the text. From such a perspective, the reading of the text would appear to be merely the in-itself meaningless investment of labor which is nevertheless necessary to render the text’s intention and meaning transparent, so that the latter can be brought out and sublated as the original idea. This process presupposes a form of blindness in relation to the text in its materiality and movements, the blindness of the philosopher: “The philosopher is blind to Bataille’s text because he is a philosopher only through the desire to hold on to, to maintain his certainty of himself and the security of the concept as security against this sliding. For him, Bataille’s text is full of traps: it is, in the initial sense of the word, a scandal” (Derrida, Writing 268). This “sliding” that makes every conceptual and thematic reading unsatisfactory and necessitates a textual reading cannot be demonstrated on a theme like “expenditure” or the “gift.” It can only be demonstrated on the movements of the text itself. In other words, we must show that the particular theme is merely the surface effect of the expenditure practiced by this mode of writing. The stake of reading, therefore, cannot be only the explication of the way the text produces a concept. It also needs to reveal the movement that releases the concept produced as the effect of the play of signifiers and syntax to the movement of the text which then ruins it as a concept.
How are we supposed to read the text then?
[1] “Subjectivity is first encountered in life, which is the opposite of extrinsicality. The heart, liver, eye are not independent individualities on their own account; the hand, severed from the body, decays. The organic body is still a whole composed of a multiplicity of mutually external members, but each individual organ subsists only in the subject, and the Notion exists as the power which unites them.” See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. and trans. M. J. Petry, Vol. 1 (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 210.