We indict the framing of this DA: politics subordinate humanity to productivity which, while claiming to represent the people

Bataille’s publications on politics ridicule ethical and moral thinking as the props and alibis of liberal capitalist exploitation, stating that all thought that does not immediately challenge capitalism has a ‘demeanour of senile trickery and comical smugness’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 32). Mainstream political debate and ethical discussion is ruled by such trickery and smugness to this day. There has been absolutely no rejuvenation of political thought since Bataille’s day, indeed if the dominant liberal traditions were senile in Bataille’s age, they are zombified today, preserved in a media void, neither dead nor alive and leaving the majority utterly indifferent. Yet, Bataille’s position was an optimistic one: the ‘uprising of the lower classes’ promised a new society beyond bourgeois liberal capitalism. The agitation of the lower classes is analogous to the left pole of the sacred: they must bring down the elevated and powerful in order to rejuvenate the whole. Bataille finds in Nietzsche powerful support for his growing dis- trust of political organisation and action. For Bataille, politics (in the accepted or restricted sense) is always tied to temporality, to objects Politics and community 61 62 Politics and community and goals: it reflects on the past, finds it deficient and seeks improve- ments for the future. This is what enslaves [subordinates] politics to time or duration, just as it enslaves [subordinates] human beings to a condition of working for and anticipating ends and goals, and the elusive search for happiness. The present moment is denied or suppressed. Being is thus fragmented by role, career, position, place, time. For Bataille, the present – an eternal moment of infinite freedom, must not be denied. Given this constitutive fragmentation, politics, in the conventional sense, can only fail. It must fail because, in a sense, it is designed to fail, just as ethics always fails – neither really help the lowly or excluded. They fail because their purpose is to defuse the incendiary nature of being, to deny the scream of life, to prescribe a slow, torturous neutralisation of life mortgaged against the future. The future always belongs to those with power; it is the now which must be seized. Bataille’s ‘politics’ is a politics of community, of an ‘impossible’ community. Though Bataille rejects parliamentary democracy and its political systems, parties and organisations as barriers to freedom, along with all utopian attempts to reform or ameliorate the existing system, it does not follow that his thought is apolitical as some have charged. Bataille’s revolutionary thinking on the political envisages a different world, a fundamentally altered society, and an altered or ‘other’ commu- nism (Bataille, in Mitchell & Winfree, 2009, p. 205). Far from giving up on these hopes, Bataille turned to mysticism and to eroticism to deepen this search for revolutionary transformation. Mysticism and eroticism do indeed open new worlds, worlds radically other than that of productive, servile labour and the demands of capitalist accumulation.