In The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Bataille makes a number of pronouncements about "sinning" and also acknowledges that it is absolutely true that he conflates two things. These are the facing of death in actuality and the facing of death symbolically. I read his tone as one of reflective bemusement and affirmation.
Understanding his system to the extent I do, it is absolutely necessary to connect the two, the symbolic and the real, as they irrevocably linked in the unconscious mind and do tend to slide into each other in practice.
What is the symbolic facing of death. Whence does the need for it emerge? I trace a link to a Freud, although his superego must be understood to operate in a much more generalized sense than he represents. The internalization of prohibitions takes place, as my studies and introspection attest, in relation to a fear of death as a natural consequence of not conforming to the norms that those in authority require. The child's immature mind ascertains that those in authority demand conformity in exchange for belonging. We are herd creatures at the deepest levels of our psyche, so we associate not conforming with being cast out from the herd, which in the days of yore meant certain death. We unconsciously conform in order to belong, which is to avoid the condition of being cast out to fend for ourselves.
The key here is that our drive to conformity is unconscious. We don't realize we are driven to unconsciously obey social norms. Only, the moment we stop acting with unconscious obedience, that is to say, following social conventions blindly, the fear of death makes itself felt. There should be no need to state that this sensation initially takes the form only of a symbolic fear of death. Those norms that one had internalized during very early childhood, and which one has been compelled to show obeisance to without question, are not in fact as inviolable as one inevitably feels. To contradict oneself by going against the principles one has internalized will certainly feel like a confrontation with death, but since both the internalized norms and one's sense of death are necessarily subjective, this is just a symbolic encounter with death. One may feel like one's very mind is shattering, but that is one's internalized construction of the limits that one is facing, nothing more.
Real death almost always has its boundaries at a range much broader than the subjectivity constructs them. Another way of saying this is that it's rare for one's subjective sensations of shattering the limits of the self to correlate with any direct threat to one's concrete existence. If the confrontation is shamanic, which is to say deliberate, one always encounters the one before one encounters the other.
That one encounters physical death ultimately is inevitable. So it is unavoidable, too, that the external limits are also finally shattered and one passes into nothingness. Yet this eventuality is less interesting, in a way, than what can be achieved in relation to death's symbolism -- which is to say, while we are still living.
To seek to temporarily overcome one's fear as it relates to one's personal limits is Bataille's project. To face death in this way is to destroy "oneself" but only in the sense that one forces an encounter with one's structural limits. Since the natural instinct of all herd animals is to preserve oneself through conformity, one forces this encounter with one's limits through sadistically denying one's needs to conform. This produces a certain animal terror, as one faces destruction. Even though this action does not seem like anything as dramatic as "facing death" from a spectator's point of view, it feels that way from the inside, since it is devised for oneself as one's own very personalized system of torture: "If it hurts here, I will press on it."
The temporary destruction of one's limits is what Bataille sees as an experience of the sacred. One reproaches death with the fact of one's mortality recurrently in this way. This form of animal defiance enhances knowledge of one's individual nature, as distinct from the herd, and thus extends Nietzsche's project. The system of exploring one's individual limits can never be finished, because we are mortal. Furthermore, by consciously embracing our mortality by means of facing death symbolically, we also deny the limits of meaning formulated by all herd methods of "knowing". Therefore the project Bataille has formulated is called The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge.
Understanding his system to the extent I do, it is absolutely necessary to connect the two, the symbolic and the real, as they irrevocably linked in the unconscious mind and do tend to slide into each other in practice.
What is the symbolic facing of death. Whence does the need for it emerge? I trace a link to a Freud, although his superego must be understood to operate in a much more generalized sense than he represents. The internalization of prohibitions takes place, as my studies and introspection attest, in relation to a fear of death as a natural consequence of not conforming to the norms that those in authority require. The child's immature mind ascertains that those in authority demand conformity in exchange for belonging. We are herd creatures at the deepest levels of our psyche, so we associate not conforming with being cast out from the herd, which in the days of yore meant certain death. We unconsciously conform in order to belong, which is to avoid the condition of being cast out to fend for ourselves.
The key here is that our drive to conformity is unconscious. We don't realize we are driven to unconsciously obey social norms. Only, the moment we stop acting with unconscious obedience, that is to say, following social conventions blindly, the fear of death makes itself felt. There should be no need to state that this sensation initially takes the form only of a symbolic fear of death. Those norms that one had internalized during very early childhood, and which one has been compelled to show obeisance to without question, are not in fact as inviolable as one inevitably feels. To contradict oneself by going against the principles one has internalized will certainly feel like a confrontation with death, but since both the internalized norms and one's sense of death are necessarily subjective, this is just a symbolic encounter with death. One may feel like one's very mind is shattering, but that is one's internalized construction of the limits that one is facing, nothing more.
Real death almost always has its boundaries at a range much broader than the subjectivity constructs them. Another way of saying this is that it's rare for one's subjective sensations of shattering the limits of the self to correlate with any direct threat to one's concrete existence. If the confrontation is shamanic, which is to say deliberate, one always encounters the one before one encounters the other.
That one encounters physical death ultimately is inevitable. So it is unavoidable, too, that the external limits are also finally shattered and one passes into nothingness. Yet this eventuality is less interesting, in a way, than what can be achieved in relation to death's symbolism -- which is to say, while we are still living.
To seek to temporarily overcome one's fear as it relates to one's personal limits is Bataille's project. To face death in this way is to destroy "oneself" but only in the sense that one forces an encounter with one's structural limits. Since the natural instinct of all herd animals is to preserve oneself through conformity, one forces this encounter with one's limits through sadistically denying one's needs to conform. This produces a certain animal terror, as one faces destruction. Even though this action does not seem like anything as dramatic as "facing death" from a spectator's point of view, it feels that way from the inside, since it is devised for oneself as one's own very personalized system of torture: "If it hurts here, I will press on it."
The temporary destruction of one's limits is what Bataille sees as an experience of the sacred. One reproaches death with the fact of one's mortality recurrently in this way. This form of animal defiance enhances knowledge of one's individual nature, as distinct from the herd, and thus extends Nietzsche's project. The system of exploring one's individual limits can never be finished, because we are mortal. Furthermore, by consciously embracing our mortality by means of facing death symbolically, we also deny the limits of meaning formulated by all herd methods of "knowing". Therefore the project Bataille has formulated is called The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge.
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