Finished the book about those French guys and I hereby swear to go cold turkey: no more reading about them for quite a while, no more lit theory for quite a while, maybe even no more academic philosophy for quite a while, maybe no more philosophy. Loved the title of Eleanor Kaufman’s The Delirium of Praise. I was easy there and threw out the money, even though I should have known better. But it is a study of Five of the Big Guys: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, and Klossowski. I read a lot of Bataille about ten years ago. How much I got I’ve never been sure. I recently read James Miller’s superb book on Foucault. I wanted to learn more about Blanchot because he’s re-appeared in things steadily over the years and I’d read a bit of Lars Iyer’s Spurious, the book, and the website of the same name and Iyer is big on Blanchot. Plus Kaufman seemed to have a really neat thing—to study the minor writings of these writers in which the praise one another excessively. None of the bitter warfare of ordinary critical (“dialectical”) literary feuding and positioning. Instead the intoxicating ether in which they conjoin intellectually in the act of praise.
The yield, by the time the book ended, seemed to decrease with each turn of the page. It was a dissertation before it was a book and having written my own I am painfully sensitive to the weaknesses of the genre. Plus I didn’t learn much about Blanchot. Or not enough to make it interesting all the way through the book. I did enjoy finding out that Klossowski and Bataille were the non-praising duo of the group, the exception to prove the rule. And Klossowski criticized Bataille, attacked Bataille, for being too much of a capitalist. Maybe attack is always more fun than praise after all. Klossowski says of Bataille, after a number of rounds of disagreement over the years, “no one finally, was more anticommunist than Bataille” and “in the worst sense Bataille realized these predictions: he remained an anarchist who fell back into capitalism while marxism all around him was characterized by powerlessness.” Bataille was famously concerned with the sacred, evil and eroticism and he propounded a rather brilliant theory of a general economy that makes him sound like a great guy on Mitt Romney’s staff. Money . . . “is but a form of energy.” Money is thereby the locus of fundamental contradiction. While it defines the restricted, homogeneous system which it safeguards under the rhetoric of equal exchange, money is, in itself, “nothing but energy and excessive energy at that.” Money is “a sign of sheer excess, one that is so excessive as to approximate the absolutely intangible, nothingness itself, heterogeneity par excellence.” “The general economy [makes apparent that] excesses of energy are produced which by definition, cannot be utilized. The excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning.” Hence we have the need for limitless loss or squandering. Sounds like private equity, hedge fund heaven to me. But I will confess to a Fox News comprehension of these things. Anyway, back to the delirium of excess and praise. By the last pages of the book, Kaufman gets tangled in the language of all this theory and these six thinkers and her need to prove her study has shown us something. When I came to the following on page 128, I thought of the old New Yorker when the little passages used to fill out a column would come from benighted publications and then the editors would make a snide comment about the poor grammar and poor style and poor taste of the passage.
“Such a chronological explanation raises as many questions as it explains, but it is useful in characterizing the Klossowski-Bataille exchange as a catalyst in a larger nuclear reaction. Perhaps this exchange might be fashioned as a pocket of imbalance, a pocket of reserve that is necessary to the maintenance of the larger general economy. As Bataille often reminds us, the general economy does not issue from nowhere, but issues otherwise from an established restricted economy. In this regard, Klossowski and Bataille mark a disjunction of theory and practice that enables a larger and more absolute interpenetration of the two. By way of conclusion, it is interesting to map out such a model along the lines of work that has been done in the field of chaos theory. . . . dissipative structure . . . pocket of increased order . . . in a system that is on an overall course tending toward disorder. . . . . explosion of nonsubjectified chaos our of a nicely reversible order of subject and object boundaries . . . . absolute laudatory excess . . . . whose theories of pulsional expenditure . . . larger group dynamics. Finally, like a movie with multiple endings, we have a visit from grandpa Lévi-Strauss to talk about gift exchange, a short story by Camus and a movie by Pasolini. “ so that what is created is a community of thought that knows no bounds, a hospitality that liquidates identity, a communism of the soul.” Last line of the book. At last.
I’m afraid I am still curious about Blanchot. Against my better judgment I’ll try reading one of his novels that I just bought. Is this masochism? Or addiction? The degeneration of brain chemistry that comes with age? Alzheimers? Be careful what you joke about.
