Anti-util leads to war

(Richard, Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology in The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism )

In the worldview of both Bataille and that of German young conservatives, war plays an essential, positive role. It serves as a means of dissolving the principium individuationis: the principle of a bourgeois subjectivity, on which the homogenous order of society - a world of loneliness and fragmentation – depends. For, according to Bataille, “the general movement of life is... accomplished beyond the demands of individuals.”32 It is in precisely this spirit that he celebrates the non-utilitarian nature of “combat” or “war” as a type of aestheticist end in itself: “Glory...expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of measureless expenditure of energy, which the fervor of combat presupposes. Combat it glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment.”33 For the same reasons, Bataillsssse eulogizes those premodern “warrier societies in which pure, uncalculated violence and ostentatious forms of combat held sway.”34 For under such conditions, war was not made subservient to the vulgar ends of enterprise and accumulation, as is the case for modern-day imperialism, but served as a glorious end in itself. Yet in the early 1930s, it was precisely this aestheticist celebration of “violence for violence’s sake,” or “war for war’s sake,” that Benjamin viewed as the essence of modern fascism. As he remarks in a well known passage: “Fiat ars – pereat mundus,” says fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense pereption that has been changed by technology...Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic.35 In Bataille’s thought war serves as the harbinger of a cultural transfiguration in which the prismacy of self-subsistent subjectivity would be replaced by the values of an “unavowable” or “ecstatic community”: that is, a community that would no longer be governed by the goals of a “visual culture” – transparency, self-identity, etc. – but instead, those of self-laceration, difference, and finitude. In fact this Bataille-inspired program of an ecstatic community has been quite explicitly carried forth and explored in the political writings of Maurice Blanchot (La Communaute inavouable; 1983) and Jean-Luc Nancy (La Communaute desoeuvree; 1985).