Georges Bataille‘s “Le Rire du Nietzsche”
In
Oeuvres Complètes, VI: Somme
Athéologique, Tome II.
France:
Editions Gallimard, 1973.
Translated by Jan von Stille
There are both possibility and
impossibility in the world. We are enveloped by the heavens,
that star-stuck space where we discover the laws of harmony, of general
viability. We cannot but sense that some horror is suspended in this domain,
ungraspable for us. But we know with precision what belongs to the possible and
to the impossible in the terrestrial domain. The possible is organic life and
its development in a favorable milieu. The impossible is the final death, the
necessity to destroy in order to exist. It is there, at least, irreducible: It
is customary for humans to attach to the latter category the exuberance of
cruelties, useless disorder, wars, tortures, oppression, vices, prostitution,
alcoholism--finally, the various horrors of misery. The possible is, for man,
the Good; the impossible is Evil. This is not just the opposition of the
agreeable to the accursed, but rather a struggle between irreconcilable
principles: On one side, a glorified Good; on the other, an Evil worthy of
eternal hellfire.
The
moral qualification of evil indicates man’s profound agreement with the
possible. It signifies, moreover, a general belief in the world-domination of
the possible. This domination must be assured. It can only be compromised by
human vice. That domination is the only meaning of the word God, implying the existence of a
sovereign perfection that governs everything in the world. There is no
impossibility if God exists, or at least the impossible is an illusion: It is a
test imposed on humanity; the triumph of the possible is given in advance.
There remains, however, a problem: Evil must be punished, the bad subjected to
their eternal torture. The Inferno is, in truth, the condensation of the
impossible, the sanction of eternity attached to the impossible. I cannot
conceive of any imagination that would indicate more strongly the reentrance of
the “will to the impossible.” The Inferno makes the divine lie into an
infantile fakeness, naive, not even trying to mask itself.
The
possible, so it seems, exists at the limit of the impossible. As though some
conscious volition had sought the maximum of the impossible: It’s self-evident
a notion of the possible first becomes necessary at this maximum. Belief in the
Inferno is this conception’s inverse, eternal hellfire being the minimum of the
impossible; but, by hazard, this minimum is infinitely larger than the maximum
given by its inverse. Thus the human imagination proceeds, like nature itself,
to the largest impossibility.
In
truth that seems absolute, God is nothing but a compromise between man’s
contradictory wills. He is the mediation between the possible and the
impossible. In the order of profound conceptions, God surpasses all categories
of intelligence to the point of being beyond both the possible and the
impossible, containing the one just as well as the other. Thus the interior
experience of Eckhart gives to God, as by necessity, the attribute of
intellectual impossibility. That of Angele de Foligno communicates with God
through the love of a demon. Clear that the will to reduce everything to the
possible is limited to the terrestrial domain: Heaven escapes it just as well
as Hell does. But there arises some slippage, of which the point of departure
is the possible. It is necessary, first of all, that the world does not come to
us contained within the domain of the possible, at least not fundamentally, and
therefore it must become so. In order to make that happen, death is rejected:
The world is so fundamentally the possible that one cannot see, in death,
anything other than a vain appearance. But it is also necessary that the
possible, in part, should depend on human will, so that impossibility will have
a representative here below. Personal salvation is the piece of a system by
which the elusion of the impossible is expressed.
Even
as well as it is inscribed in the feebleness of man, in the repugnance to live
the idea of the impossible, this system of equilibrium is fragile. The time
comes when one imagines that one must simply fight against the impossible,
actually chase it off the earth. Nature being good, the impossible conceived as
the faults of man, why not just fix things up here below. It is then necessary
to eliminate the crimes of which the evil are guilty, to track every type of
impossibility across the earth, to chase it forever. Man’s duty is to pledge
his life to this work. So it is that alcohol introduces misery to logic itself,
miscarried babies, battered women: It is then necessary, it is duty, to do away
with alcohol. And to perform this duty so well that, in the end, only the
possible remains.
But
that realism, following in the footsteps of the old beliefs, must come to grips
with the ruin of the ideas of the immortal soul and God. Beliefs must then
return to the beyond. Modern realism admits death, makes human life the
birthplace and the prey of an
impossible nothing. Likewise, in the person of God is found the only guarantee
of the possible in whose name one fights.
The
success of realist ideas hindered, at first, the perception that man was
situated in this way in relation to the impossible that he had made. In truth,
this fundamental impossible seemed negligible by comparison to the horrors
which one encountered more directly within it. Otherwise, one would have had
nothing to lose: Death and God’s absence wouldn’t have been news, would have
existed before disbelief did. In the certitude of an indefinite progression, is
it really necessary to worry about old infantilisms?
But
God and immortality had such a grand place in past human agitations that one
might doubt whether their eviction can remain without consequences. A large
number of people have let go of general guarantee in favor of immediate
satisfaction. Today such immediate satisfaction is the default. Certain persons
think, superficially, that things have begun to regress; still others return to
God; a small number, seeing man as the certain prey of the impossible, envisage
a new attitude in their anguish: not to elude anything, to live the impossible.
If
God is dead, if man is no less abandoned than the beasts that devour each other,
it is doubtless praiseworthy to ameliorate the human condition. Except that I
can imagine, in the long run, mounting difficulties--the maximum having been
attained, it’s possible that, in the end, people may be satisfied: The largest
number is, in effect, easy to satisfy; but, once they’ve been satisfied, at the
very least I foresee, without the least surprise, the emergence of a blindness
in their inability to perceive the impossible in themselves. There is in man an
impossible that nothing can reduce, fundamentally the same for the happiest and
the most dejected. The difference is in elusion; happiness is doubtless a
desirable form of elusion, but happiness can’t but push back the date. As one
cannot wall oneself off to retreat from this date, one has not alternative but,
finally, to face the impossible. To put life--that is, the possible--at the
measure of the impossible is all that can be done by a person who does not want
to elude anymore.
One
day this task may bring--but not necessarily--consequences on the order of action, but rather defining itself as spiritual. This is an old word, the
precise sense of which remains linked to forms of life that lack neither
narrowness nor ambiguity. I employ the word in a sense that neighbors that of
this tradition, but to precise it: The spiritual is that which arises from
ecstasy, from religious sacrifice (from the sacred), from tragedy, from poetry, from
laughter--or from anguish. The spirit is not entirely spiritual. The intellect,
not at all. Basically, the spiritual domain is that of the impossible. I would
say that ecstasy, sacrifice, tragedy, poetry, laughter are the forms in which
life puts itself at the measure of the impossible. But these are natural forms,
in that the sacrificer, the poet, the laugher don’t think at all that they’re
putting themselves at the measure of the impossible; but rather one sacrifices,
one is inspired, one laughs without knowing that which troubles him, yet
eluding it by sacrifice, poetry, laughter. If, acquiring consciousness of the
impossible, I put myself on its level, I may or may not be ecstatic, may or may
not laugh, may or may not have a sacred, poetic, or tragic sentiment; I no
longer shield myself from suffering the impossible of things, I recognize it as
such, I do not elude the impossible at which I laugh, etc…
Traditionally,
salvation occupies the center of spiritual life. But the will to salvation
indicates the resolution to elude the impossible. Salvation is but a hybrid
form. At its root, salvation is just the principle of action (placed onto the
temporal) introduced on the order of the spiritual. It must be regarded as an
intrusion thereinto. In that respect, it’s the same as God, even if God slides
always, necessarily toward the impossible. The God of Eckhart is the same as
the good God. God is doubtless a notion so moving that one cannot but reduce it
to platitude, to the non-spiritual, to the possible. Salvation does not save
itself but through anguish. Without that, it is the perfect negation of the
spiritual, entirely linked to loss.
That
which gives importance to salvation isn’t so much the goal in itself as the
principle of introducing a goal into spiritual life. The impossible needs a
possible from which it can propel itself. Salvation is the possible that the
spirit needs so that it can confront the impossible. But in salvation, the
possible is the end of the impossible: In this respect, therefore, it is an
elusion. If spiritual life requires the elusion of its principle, it is not
what it claims to be. Salvation is but a commodity in spite of which, rarely, spiritual life takes place--I’d like to
say the possible as it attaches itself to the impossible. But this routine is
so old that one no longer imagines spiritual life outside the search for
salvation. If salvation is not in question, what raison d’être could spiritual life have? Said differently: Which
possible to introduce into the impossible?
I
explain myself thus with the actual intention of giving Nietzsche’s interior
experience a breadth that has never before been drawn out. I feel no need, on
this occasion, to say all that is possible to understand as impossibility, nor
in what way ecstasy, sacrifice, etc… put the possible on the impossible’s
level. It would be long, and I’ve already said it or will say it elsewhere.
More than ever, I’d like to address myself to those proud beings, who are
consequently in no way tied to the possible, who have of the impossible the
sentiment, at least, that the tragic, the poetic, and the laughable are to be
found within it. I limit myself to these two propositions, already implicitly
indicated: “Each impossible is that by which some possible ceases to be (as I
have said, without the possible there would be no impossible: the tragic is the
attribute of the powerful” -- “At the extreme limit of its power, each possible
aspires to the impossible (to that which destroys it as the possible).” I recall that the aspiration to the impossible
is exactly the spiritual (as action is always aspiration to the possible). But
again, at the moment when the will to salvation is rejected from the spiritual
as an intrusion, what is the possible without which there would be no impossible?
Roughly,
the impossible enters Nietzsche’s life in the form of a vigorous and welcome
physical disease. As tragic as what had come to pass may seem today, Nietzsche’s future around 1880 seemed, to him, still more so. He said himself,
of Zarathustra’s cries, that one may not comprehend them without weeping: He
lived, at that moment, under the weight of what was in front of him. The most
graspable fact of Nietzsche’s life is that he abandoned Schopenhauer’s
philosophy at the moment his sickness justified pessimism within his own
particular existence. He said no to life when life was easy: He said yes when
life took the shape of the impossible. He could not have forgotten, himself,
inscribing the epoch of Zarathustra with these words: “To see tragic natures
fall and to be able to laugh thereat, despite the profound comprehension, the
emotion and sympathy that one feels, that is divine.”
In
principle, laughter is the reaction the impossible gives when sympathy does not
come into play personally. If the impossible obtains in indifference, or if it obtains
in beings for whom, for me, sympathy is proper, but without really putting them
in play, I can laugh at the impossible in person: The impossible then leaves
the essential of the possible intact. Laughing at the impossible that obtains
in me, laughing to know that I have fallen, I am a god who mocks the possible
that he is. I no longer place life at the measure of the impossible in order to
elude, like nature does in a tragedy, following Aristotle’s theory of
catharsis. Zarathustra renders laughter sacred.
Now I can laugh with insistence, but laughter is lightness; if Nietzsche had done it himself,
he would have lacked intent. The transparence and the lightness of dance in amor fati would not have been attained. To put
life at the measure of the impossible without elusion requires a moment of divine
friendship.
Nietzsche
leaves much to be guessed: There’s scarcely a surface to lean on in his
writings. But what can divinity attained in laughter mean, if not the absence
of God? It is necessary to advance unto death and to say not only, “see the
fall,” but rather, “do the fall.” Nietzsche said it in Beyond Good and Evil: “Is it not necessary, finally, to sacrifice
all that consoles, sanctifies, and protects, all hope, every path to hidden
harmony? Is it not necessary to sacrifice God himself?” To be divine is not only
to put life at the measure of the impossible; it is to renounce the guarantee
of the possible. There is no more perfect comprehension of the notion people
have of God. God does not tolerate himself as possible. Man is limited to this
tolerance, but God, the all-powerful, is not. God’s misery is the will of
mankind to appropriate God for itself through salvation. This will expresses
the imperfection of the possible in man, but the perfect possible that is God
never stops falling into horror and into the impossible. To die an atrocious
death, an infamous death, abandoned by all, abandoned by himself--to what else
can the perfect possible aspire? He would be idiotic and small without such an
aspiration! Man who is nothing but man may fulfill it at the moment of his
grandest thought, may hoist himself to the heights of God: The limit of man is
not God, is not the possible, but rather the impossible, the absence of God.
Nietzsche’s
interior experience does not lead to God but to his absence, it is the possible
putting itself at the measure of the impossible, it loses itself in
representing an abominable world. The eternal return has a particular way of
precipitating being, as though it had fallen, into the double-impossible of
Time. The impossible, in the common representation of time, is not encountered
but at the extremes of the eternal past and eternal future. In the eternal
return, the instant itself is a single impossible movement projected to both extremes. Thought of as truth on which
thought sits, the eternal return is a story, but what about as an abyss? It
cannot be closed. The thought of man forcing itself to embrace time is
destroyed by violence: To consider time, the pride of man cannot situate itself
but in vertigo, because of which one sees a platitude. To be dizzy, to place
oneself at the measure of a fall into the impossible, is the only expression of
interior experience, that is to say of an ecstatic revelation of the
impossible. It is not necessary, to that effect, to introduce the eternal return
(and less still to found it in science), however it is an intelligible
sign--and the irrefutable critique of sleep. Nothing larger than that
hypertrophy of the impossible.
But
the myth, the symbol of eternal return cannot be considered in isolation. It
relates to the conditions in which life attains the impossible. I have already
said it twice: The impossible is not reached but by the possible; without the
possible, there’d be no impossible. I’ll go further: The impossible flabbily
reached by the negligence of the possible is an impossible eluded in advance:
Confronted without force, it’s nothing but naughtiness. The will to salvation
is but an intrusion into the spiritual order, but it at least links the
possible to the impossible. The impossible is self-loss. How to get someone to
lose himself if not in exchange for some profit? It’s of little importance that
the profit is illusory or smaller than the loss: Deceptive or not, it’s the
offer of gain that renders loss accessible. If man refuses to make a vulgar
possibility into the goal of reaching the impossible, if he renounces
salvation, what possible will he introduce into the impossible? That’s the
question that I’ve formulated just now. Man is not God, he is not the perfect
possible: It is necessary for him, firstly, to pose the possible. Salvation is
miserable in that it puts the possible afterward, that it makes the possible
the goal of the impossible. But if I pose the impossible first, truly first? I
cannot help but open the way to the impossible.
The
hypertrophy of the impossible, the projection of each instant into infinity,
places the possible so that it continues to exist without waiting--at the level
of the impossible. That which I am here and now is commanded to be possible:
That which I am is impossible, I know it, I put myself at the heights of the
impossible: I render the impossible possible, accessible at least. The virtue
of this non-elusion is that it gives salvation first, such that it is not the goal but the springboard of the
impossible. Eternal return opens the abyss, but it is a challenge to jump. The
abyss is the impossible and the dwelling place, but a leap introduced into the
impossible the possible that it is, a possible pledged, from the beginning,
without the least reserve, to the impossible. The leap is the Übermensch of
Zarathustra, is the will to power. The smallest compression, and the jump would
no longer take place. The jumper with his impulsion would rivet his feet to the
soil. How would he not have pitied himself if he has pitied others? He that
wishes to eliminate the impossible of the overwhelming earth cannot jump. The
necessary quality of him who jumps is lightness.
Nietzsche
enunciates the idea that he would be understood in fifty years, but would one
who knows himself capable of grasping the sense of the jump remain nonetheless
incapable of actually jumping? The jump of Nietzsche is interior experience,
the ecstasy where the eternal return and Zarathustra’s laugh reveal themselves.
To comprehend is to make an internal experience of the jump, it is to jump.
Several types of exegesis of Nietzsche have been made. But the experience of a
jump is yet, after him, to be made. The path by which one jumps is yet to be
created, to utter resounding cries at the edge of the abyss. In other terms,
this is yet to be done: To create, by a praxis and a doctrine, a form of
spiritual life which was unimaginable until Nietzsche, such that some time-worn
word unmasks, finally, the face of the impossible.