Bataille draws upon Marx as a resource against the surrealists and their ‘pretentious idealist aberrations’ (1985, p. 32). In a revealing statement Bataille declares: ‘It is of course difficult to avoid a feeling of contempt for revolutionaries to whom the revolution is not, before all else, the decisive phase of the class struggle’ (1985, p. 33, emphasis in original). Marxism, for Bataille, is the only revolutionary movement that has freed itself from idealism: it does not seek to raise or elevate all, but to overthrow those who have asserted an elevated position. Bataille contrasts idealist and imperialist revolutions, symbolised by the eagle which soars high and tears apart its victims with its sharp beak, to materialist revolutions which begin low down, in the earth. The materialist or ‘geological uprising’ is symbolised, for Bataille, by the ‘old mole’, a figure which appears in Marx and Engels’ The Commu- nist Manifesto (1967, originally published in 1848). Bataille often draws attention to human rootedness in dirt: the big toe of the human foot which enables the upright posture does so by pressing into the earth; the ‘dirty’ and ‘defiling’ menstrual blood and seminal fluids are the sub- stances through which humans come into being. Bataille notes: ‘man experiences, in contradiction to strict morality, urges that draw him to what is low, placing him in antagonism to all forms of spiritual eleva- tion’ (1985, p. 36). Just as human beings exist in contradiction, so too do societies, which are ‘universally divided into upper and lower classes’ (p. 36). The upper classes concern themselves with ideas. Even poor- quality ideas are given a high or elevated place by the institutions which the upper classes dominate: the church, the universities, parliaments. In contrast, the lower classes are ‘base materialist’ in the sense of being steeped in sweat and toil, ravaged by unfulfilled desires and boiling with ‘measureless agitation’ (p. 36). Yet Bataille’s position was never reducible to a Marxist revolutionary one, as religion, the sacred and sacrifice play an essential role. Bataille argues that secular thought, including Marxism and communism, is unable to conceive of either the ‘Very-High or the Very-Low’, concern- ing itself with a restricted, flattened and de-energised band of phenomena between (p. 35). Indeed, for Bataille, religion is inherently political – or rather, the sacred, particularly in its ‘pre-monotheist’ form, expressed a ‘revolt’ against politics and power such that they were forced to obey its rhythms. For many centuries the sacred resisted the emergence of a state and of the profane class hierarchies that the state maintains and protects from the periodic unleashing of sacred violence (Bataille, 1988a; see also Clastres, 1977). There can be no transcending of sacred violence: secular states direct their violence outward against external territorial enemies in war and conquest, and harness the sacred to the glorification of war (Bataille, 1989a, pp. 57–58). For Bataille, a new post-capitalist ‘impos- sible’ community would be a religious as well as political formation – or rather, it would dismantle the separation of social spheres embodied in the notions of ‘politics’, ‘religion’ and ‘economy’ as autonomous social institutions. It is instructive to compare Bataille’s axis of high and low with that of the left and right poles of the sacred. There are certainly parallels between the low or base and the left pole of the sacred: both are danger- ous, contagious, defiling; both are placed behind barriers or boundary lines; both threaten the established powers and authorities. However, these pairs of terms are by no means identical. The social poles of high and low exist in contradiction, but not in a dialectical relationship, how- ever: the only way that the contradiction can be resolved, for Bataille, is in the total destruction of the upper classes and of all bourgeois values; that is, Bataille does not seek a Hegelian-style synthesis or sublation of class differences (Bataille, 1985, p. 32). Indeed, the bourgeoisie should take the role of the sacrificial victims which found the new communist order, just as the French aristocracy were the sacrificial victims on whom the new bourgeois capitalist order was founded in 1789. Here, Bataille’s notion of the sacred and sacrifice burst the Hegelian dialectic, ‘burst’ in the sense that though these ideas can be figured within the dialectic as discursive constructs, their dramatic, material appearance and the con- tagious emotions they trigger have no place in the dialectic, no place in reason or reality as construed by Hegelianism. POLITICS AND HETEROLOGY With his 1929 paper, ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade (an open letter to my current comrades)’ Bataille moves away from, or seriously revises, his earlier position. Though addressed to current comrades, the letter reaches beyond them, anticipating future readers, defined as ‘masses’. Bataille begins his letter: ‘I need to have at least some witnesses to estab- lish so complete a defection’ (1985, p. 91). By witness Bataille signals his concern with the notion of friendship and community (discussed later), and by defection Bataille declares a powerful rejection of modernity, of ‘the prestige of industrial reality [and] material progress’. The gains and short-term satisfactions enabled by industrialisation must be rejected because they lead to stagnation and a terrible impoverishment of the human condition. They lead to a society of appropriation, one that cannot excrete, that cannot expel its waste, and so cannot renew itself. Industrial modernity is society without an anus, and societies that cannot shit will die – indeed, will turn into shit. As religion is the social institution which organises excretion, the modern curtailing of religion – in its reduction to moral and cultural code, the left pole of the sacred relegated to the profane – results in moribund societies becoming defenceless against the depredations of capitalist economy. Indeed, for Bataille, religious organ- isation ‘represents the freest opening for excremental collective impulses (orgiastic impulses) established in opposition to political, juridical, and economic institutions’ (p. 94). In this work Bataille again turns towards Durkheimian social anthro- pology to effect departure from established forms of revolutionary thinking. Appropriation and excretion are termed ‘social facts’, appar- ently following Durkheim’s The Rules Of Sociological Method (1982, originally published in 1895). Yet Bataille is clear that Durkheimianism itself is also insufficiently revolutionary because as a (social) science it follows ‘the tendency of science to posit a homogeneous representation in order to avoid the discernible presence of fundamentally heterogeneous elements’ (1985, p. 160, n. 4). With this statement Bataille ‘transgresses’ the notion of social facts defined by Durkheim and developed by Mauss, and the influence of phenomenology takes on an increasing importance, particularly during Bataille’s writing of the 1940s. For Bataille, eroticism, religious activity and the intimate bodily processes – defecation, urination, also laughter and sobbing – have a deep commonality in that the object of these activities is treated as a foreign body, as heterogeneous, meaning that it must be expelled in order for a closed or limited system to maintain itself. The sacred then is concerned with the movements, circulation and transmutation of foreign bodies. In contrast, appropriation is characterised by homogeneity and stagna- tion. This associating of the sacred with excretion and the profane with appropriation is sometimes hard to apply to traditional societies, Bataille acknowledges, yet this is part of his wider point: in traditional societ- ies there is dynamic or fluid movement between sacred and profane, yet, in industrial modernity, the profane realm achieves dominance and the appearance of stasis. The profane is widely taken to be ‘reality’, while the sacred is relegated to ‘unreality’. Bataille re-examines these themes in The Accursed Share, first published in 1949. Indeed, Bataille’s proj- ect in this work is as political as it is economic and philosophical. The notion that Bataille’s interest in politics waned after the end of the 1930s is mistaken, though influential thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy continue to make this claim (in Mitchell & Winfree, 2009, pp. 21–22). Bataille’s notion of ‘practical and theoretical heterology’, developed in the ‘Use Value’ and ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ essays, concerns politics as much as religion and philosophy. For Bataille, ‘Above all, heterology is opposed to any homogeneous representation of the world, in other words, to any philosophical system. The goal of such represen- tations is always the deprivation of our universe’s sources of excitation and the development of a servile human species’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 97). Practical heterology then is the ongoing process of challenging the political system which depends upon confining human beings in servile, productive positions. Bataille’s writings of the early 1940s, such as Inner Experience and Guilty, pursue this goal of undoing or ‘unworking’ the insidious structures of servility, utility and productivity. THE FASCIST THREAT Bataille prefaces his important work, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, first published in 1933, by declaring his proximity to Marxist critical thought, yet also noting Marxism’s inability to address society in a sufficiently holistic way, in particular by its failure to understand the intensities of religious sentiments. It isn’t possible to supplement these shortcomings in Marxist theory by adding religion to a list of topics to be examined because, for Bataille (following Durkheimian sociology) the nature of religious practice and belief conditions the entire social system, its forms of representation and symbolisation, its understanding of life and death. All attitudes, assumptions, taken-for-granted notions and ideas – scientific, cultural, economic, sexual – current in any society are linked to its moral and religious ideas (Durkheim, 1995, pp. 8–18; Durkheim & Mauss, 1961). Bataille develops further his distinction between the homogeneous ele- ments of society – where most economic activities are located – and the heterogeneous elements of society: ‘every useless element is excluded, not from all of society, but from its homogeneous part’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 138, emphasis in original). The homogeneous sphere reduces human being to a productive function, often measured numerically, such that all beings are, in a sense, interchangeable. For example, the market rate for a cleaner or a teacher is quite independent of the being who occupies these roles, and quite independent of their hopes, aspirations or financial needs. Homogeneous social structures exercise a deep coercion; however, these structures are, Bataille insists, also highly precarious and vulnerable to those aspects of society that are not reduced to homogeneity. Such ‘inter- nal’ threats include ‘mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc)’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 142). If we examine the political realm through the distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous elements, prophets, revolutionaries, heroes and heroines are decisively part of the heterogeneous realm: they do not serve an existing order but sacrifice themselves for a new future, fulfilling a tragic destiny. Unfortunately, in capitalist modernity, some fascist leaders also seem to possess or constitute heterogeneous force – in contrast to democratic politicians, who, with their vague and platitudinous slogans, tend to be situated exclusively within the homogeneous realm. This is not necessarily the case: Che Guavara and Nelson Mandela were both treated as heterological objects fit only for confinement or elimina- tion, and they continue to inspire the very passions Bataille associates with the heterogeneous – but there is a tendency in this direction. fascist leaders seem to possess ‘a force that disrupts the regular course of things’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 143), they generate an affective effervescence but not in an open, liberating or festive manner, rather they narrow, channel and concentrate these energies within their own position as leader or ‘head’. Fascism places authority above all instrumental or utilitarian concerns; it claims the values of superiority or ‘nobility’ and asserts the power to dominate others, not through rational criteria but due to the special nature or substance of the leader. Fascism is thereby highly dependent upon the operationalisation of myth to dramatise and condense a sense of superiority that has no rational basis; it is also highly dependent upon an army, dis- cussed later. Fascism, Bataille argues, seeks to ‘realise and idealise order’ and so is necessarily prone to sadistic and cruel treatments of peoples and things which seem to, or can be made to appear to, signify disorder. For Bataille, fascism emerges, historically, from monarchic sov- ereignty: both forms are dependent upon mastering, purifying and/or excluding what are seen as base or lower elements. Further, both fas- cism and royalty dependent upon a social ‘compromise’ as both seek a ‘connection with homogeneous forms at a certain level’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 146). This is an important point in Bataille’s argument: despite their posturing, fascist and monarchic leaders are not ‘pure’ heterogeneous energies; since they seek to establish and maintain control over the homogeneous sphere of society they must compromise their heteroge- neity to achieve this relationship of control and domination. Where the sacred, for Bataille, offers a moment of limitless heterogeneous experi- ence, organised social, religious and political movements must tread a careful path through the two worlds – a path which enables them to accu- mulate power where the sacred, in untrammelled form, can only give, excrete or expend without profit. Bataille is consistent in this differentia- tion between the heterogeneity of the sacred and fascism’s staged and scripted channelling of sacred myth. Fascism, like royalty, unites military and religious authority to effect a more total oppression of the people. Both systems strive for ‘a negation of humanity as a value that depends upon the play of internal opposi- tions’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 149). Monarchs, führers and generals assert a mythic, and rationally unwarrantable, individualisation of power, the reduction and concentration of social power within ‘a personal entity’ which denies the collective roots and sources of social power and wealth. Fascist leaders also depend, of course, upon a powerful army. The nature of armies and their social vocation of war-waging are under- stood by Bataille through the distinction between the heterogeneous and the homogeneous. His position is both fundamentally critical of the nature of armies and also enables an understanding of the undoubted glamour and attraction of them. The close proximity of these two elements of Bataille’s thought can result in misunderstandings. For Bataille, the chief or com- mander of the army effects a unification and concentration of the unruly and ‘base’ lower class elements that make up the fighting force of armies. The affective, mythical power of the commander – for example Hannibal, El Cid, or ‘Monty’ – provide a conduit ‘through which disgusting slaugh- ter is radically transformed into its opposite, glory – namely, into a pure and intense attraction. The glory of the chief essentially constitutes a sort of affective pole opposed to the nature of the soldiers . . . [the soldiers become] like a part of the chief himself’ (Bataille, 1985, pp. 150–151). The chief is much more than a symbol, figurehead or ideological device: he is akin to a sacred force, simultaneously the highest in rank, yet capable of triumphing amid the very lowest and vilest human carnage. The chief is a force of alternation and transformation: he presides over a universe were depraved acts of violence abhorred in peacetime are rewarded with medals and glory, where ragged, socially excluded and ‘vile’ young men are drilled and battered into a uniformed collective force in the service of monarchic power. Soldiers are not required to believe in the cause for which they are, officially, fighting; indeed such reflective thought is strongly discour- aged. Soldiers fight for their chief, and only secondarily for their fellow soldiers – and then only insofar as their comrades possess something of the force of the chief. A ‘cowardly’ or unreliable fellow soldier is vilified precisely because they do not possess the force of their chief. Power can endure only where protected by an army and, with Bataille’s theorisa- tion, the seductive, honourable élan of soldiers begins to be a little more comprehensible: The mode of heterogeneity explicitly undergoes a thorough alter- ation, completing the realisation of intense homogeneity without a decrease in the fundamental heterogeneity. In the midst of the population, the army retains the distinction of being wholly other, but with a sovereignty linked to domination, to the imperative and separate character that the chief transmits to his soldiers. (Bataille, 1985, p. 151, emphasis in original) Yet, for Bataille, religious power is more fundamental, older and more powerful than military force. The sacred can never be assimilated to, or supplanted by, the violence and horror of armies of war – this was Caillois’s suggestion in the preface to the second edition of his Man and the Sacred, and it was curtly rejected by Bataille: ‘This interpretation is shocking . . . it lacks understanding of both the sacred and war. And to be blunt it essentially lacks understanding of contemporary man’ (Bataille, 1987, cited in Bailey-Gill, 1995, p. 24). This is because, for Bataille, the source of the sacred is pure or undifferentiated heterogeneity, the force of that which transgresses all limits. Religious authority ‘con- fronts the bare and unlimited form of undifferentiated heterogeneity, before any of its perceptible elements (ones that can be made explicit) have been fixed by a still vague direction’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 152). Undifferentiated heterogeneity provokes dread, awe and horror. The earliest symbolic representations of the sacred or divine dramatised its ‘free and irresponsible violence’ (p. 152). The figure of Kali, as an example of such free and irresponsible violence, was discussed in the previous chapter. Where capitalist democracies have, by and large, been content to allow the erosion of religious power, whilst maintaining a hypocritical enhancement of military forces, fascist organisation has recognised the power inherent in religious and mythic sentiments. Indeed, fascism seeks to unite the heterogeneous energies of both religion and the military in the person of the leader. This has made it highly successful in responding to the crises generated by capitalist economics: Thus, qualities characteristic of the two dominations (internal and external, military and religious) are simultaneously implied: qualities derived from the introjected homogeneity, such as duty, discipline, and obedience; and qualities derived from the essential heterogeneity, imperative violence, and the positioning of the chief as a transcendent object of collective affectivity . . . the fascist uni- fication is not simply a uniting of powers from different origins and a symbolic uniting of classes: it is also the accomplished uniting of the heterogeneous elements with the homogeneous elements of sovereignty in the strictest sense with the State. (Bataille, 1985, pp. 154–155, emphasis in original) Collective affectivity can lead to revolutionary fervour and even to rad- ical democratisation, although there can be no guarantees of the direction or end result of collective fervour. Unlike monarchic rulers, fascist lead- ers unleash collective affectivity by uniting rather than dividing classes. The hardening of divisions between classes is also a weakness in most forms of socialism, Bataille suggests. Clearly, fascism does not ‘liberate’ working class people, indeed it unites them only by ‘the negation of their nature’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 154): they become nothing but the raw material to fill uniforms, wave flags, shoot guns and persecute the ‘enemies’ they have posited. Nevertheless, fascism succeeds in transforming the disper- sal, isolation and anomie characteristic of capitalist modernity into their opposites – unity and collective belonging – and in channelling the latent and largely unacknowledged violence of capitalist organisation into an active or manifest force. In short, fascism diverts the energy of internal revolution into external war and to ever-escalating internal persecution.