Bataille’s reasoning justifies atrocities and death

In 1933, Bataille contributed a review of André Malraux’s novel La Condition humaine to the ultra left-wing journal La Critique sociale.1 In this article, Bataille questions the place that revolution occupies in the larger and more general context of “human agitation.” He asks, for example, whether the convulsive movements of revolt, social upheaval, and revolution should be situated outside of, or above, what is normally experienced as life in its quotidian expressions of tenderness, enthusiasm or even hate. In the name of what authority, for example, might one be justified in placing the fascination with pleasure, torture and possible death outside the limits of acceptable social practice – extreme states often linked to revolutionary upheaval outside the limits of acceptable social practice? Another way of situating the convulsion of revolutionary movements – an approach clearly endorsed by Bataille – is to place it squarely within the framework of any activity marked by agitation. From this perspective, the acts of torture and murder would arise from an excitability or arousal similar in nature to that intensifying the fury of the revolutionary impulse. This impulse, writes Bataille, is a means by which the proletariat – who had for a long time been deprived of the possibility of attributing any value to suffering and to life – is able to gain access to value itself, a value linked to states of excitation unsubordinated to any simple political means or end. This value, and the state of agitation to which it is linked, gives the proletariat both life and hope, for which even death in all its atrocity might be the payment required.