Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 02:29:22 -0600 (CST)
Subject: ritual habitual




> "The monstrous force of the understanding," Leonardo mentions (08/13),
> our naming of ourselves, and effecting through language, individualizes
> and denominates entities, but only out of an awareness of death, or
> across the 'ugly center' of excess, where the language of gnosis mutters
> unintelligibly, or in a way that cannot be _used_ economically.  One
> cannot decide to appropriate such a thing, because it is not part of the
> self, or subject, and neither can the effects of the experience be
> disappropriated, because it cannot be objectified.
> 

    What unleashes the "monstrous force" is the power of the negative that
obliterates and replaces, that signifies and understands according to the
possibility of extinction that writing and discourse allow us to play
with. This includes, eventually, everything in nature and everything
human, hence the in-humanity of the daimonic invoked here in relation to
Hegel (Here is to say in Bataille's commentary/exposition of Kojeve's
Hegel lectures, in Yale French Studies #78). A little further along we
encounter this; "What Hegel unleashes here is not the violence of Nature,
it is the energy, or the violence, of the Understanding -- the Negativity
of the Understanding -- opposing itself to the pure beauty of the dream,
which cannot act, which is impotent." (p.16). The knife is raised once
more..
      ..dismantling the coherence of plausible reconstructions, which
always implies a repetition of experience. What is incomparably unique
(such as a dream) occurs as an excess or overflow of this economy of
return. The secondary elaboration that gives it intelligibility reproduces
this uneasy relation to what falls out of the account, what can't be
expressed as such but makes its effects felt as a deeper necessity. The
necessity noted here is that of ananke, the path of chance contingencies
whose passage of events is one's own (in a sense). This is the hieroglyph
of one's life of which only fragments are ever objectified. However, all
such attempts at a characterization, with all their structural
implications, only help to betray the reality because of the assumptions
made in the choice of any specific signifier, no matter how gnostic. Only
the problem remains, the sense in which there is something problematic yet
to be explained. All such explanations can only function through
replacements, the structure of sacrifice, that imply the "furtive"  role
of a "surrogate" (ibid. p.19) which seem to make extreme experiences
evident to the eye, a perception by default. This is a ruse, however,
something of a comedy in Bataille's terms. Granted, this may not exactly
be clear nor fully significant, but that is the risk we run, the way we
plunge that for now lets me retreat behind one further citation,
"Concerning sacrifice, I can essentially say that, on the level of Hegel's
philosophy, Man has, in a sense, revealed and founded human truth by
sacrificing; in sacrifice he destroyed the animal in himself, allowing
himself and the animal to survive as that noncorporeal truth that Hegel
describes..."  (p.18). 

incipit comedia,
Leonardo R.