Wolin’s a misreading of Bataille.

The strongest criticisms of Bataille come from Richard Wolin’s article, “Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology". Throughout his article, Wolin compares Bataille to many proto-fascistic German thinkers. Wolin draws a connection between Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger and Bataille in relation to an “aesthetics of violence” that was common to the generation situated between the World Wars.Footnote11 In an aesthetics of violence, war has a positive position. War destroys the individualisation and subjectivity that grounds bourgeois society. Wolin says that “It is in this spirit that he [Bataille] celebrates the nonutilitarian nature of military combat as a type of aesthetic end in itself". He summarises, In Bataille’s thought war serves as the harboring of a cultural transformation in which the primacy of self-posting subjectivity would be replaced by the taboo values of an “ecstatic” community: a community no longer governed by the identitarian prejudices of visual culture—by norms of transparency, sameness, self-equivalence—but instead by those of self-laceration, difference, and finitude. Footnote12 Thus, Wolin believes that Bataille’s concept of community develops through such things as war and conflict. Wolin doubles down on this interpretation, “for it is a model that embraces an aesthetics of transgression as the norm for social action".Footnote13 As war is seen as a transgressive behaviour, it is the basis of social action, or, in other words, community forming and reinforcing behaviours. Wolin’s interpretation is heavily dependent on quotations from one of Bataille’s later works, The Accursed Share, written between 1946 and 1949. A supposed example of Bataille’s embrace of the aesthetic of violence cited by Wolin is “Glory … expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of measureless expenditure of energy, which the fervour of combat presupposes. Combat is glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment".Footnote14 This is not necessarily a glowing endorsement of war. Recognising that combat is beyond calculation is not the same as endorsing combat as a means to exceed bourgeois society. More importantly, this quote from Bataille is in the context of a discussion on rank in a potlatch. Potlatch is an Indigenous tradition from the Pacific Northwest. It is a ceremonial feast in which possessions are destroyed or given away to opposing tribes. The opposing tribes are then, by tradition or social pressure, expected to return with interest the possessions given away or destroyed. Hence, Wolin distorts Bataille's view by ignoring the context of this quotation. Bataille states that glory and warfare are misunderstood if one does not understand them through the acquisition of rank. The clearest form of obtaining rank and its relationship to expenditure is the potlatch. Likewise, communities often recognise glory and bestow accolades in reference to one’s willingness to confront death and the severity of chance in combat. What makes one glorious is the embrace of chance, and “Combat is glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment".Footnote15 Bataille is not recognising combat as the highest form of useless expenditure but recognising it as a powerful form that is honoured through rank. Moreover, Wolin’s claim hinges on a conception of community in which war acts as a catalyst that takes disparate, atomised individuals and puts them into an ecstatic collective. The crux of Wolin’s interpretation is a misinterpretation of the Bataillean conception of community. Bataille calls for a community that destroys the traditional sense of community. As the “Programme (Relative to Acéphale)” states, “1 Form a community creative of values, values creative of cohesion".Footnote16 This call to form a community based on the creation of values implies the destruction of existing communities. However, proposition 7 suggests that proposition 1 refers to a universal community: “Fight for the decomposition and exclusion of all communities national, socialist, communist or churchly – other than universal community".Footnote17 Thus, this concept of community is a rejection of nationalist, socialist, or typical religious communities. In Bataille, one is confronted with a universal community that breaks with existent communities founded on old ideals or values.