Bataille, Wolin, reposted

Bataille does not endorse immediate sense certainty. I believe that this is a mistake made by those who imagine that Bataille's agenda must necessarily be a search for "Truth". Such critics retain the old metaphysical category of Truth that Bataille has long dispensed with, when they try to critique Bataille in this way. Bataille's views were very much psychological and his writings show that he understood very much that his approach was historically situated and far from being universal in the sense that Western metaphysics would posit 'universality'. Bataille was a keen student of Hegel and Marx and thus his views were often very much situated in terms of these theoretical postulates, which do not dispense with an understanding of historically contextualised change and transformation. It is actually outrageous even to suggest that Bataille escaped into irrationalism whilst denying that he had a high level of understanding, both intellectually and experientially, of the nature of bourgeois "rationality". If his writings do not indicate that Bataille understood how the system worked, then perhaps Wolin was reading another Bataille, or reading him through the lens of metaphysical binaries, whereby rationality and irrationality are diametrically opposed, rather than being organically linked in every way (as Bataille knew them to be).  Which brings me to my next point. Engaging with the negative in emotion and dialectical swing of the metaphysical pendulum (which was Bataille's actual project, contrary to Wolin) gives one the means to understand the nature of bourgeois rationality more thoroughly.  Once again, this is because the irrational and the rational parts of mental processing are intricately linked (they are actually both the products of the human mind). They are not to be cordoned off separately, as if to embrace "rationality" was to renounce some kind of fixed component of irrationality.  This would be practically impossible.

It seems that Wolin mistakes Bataille's project for a metaphysical one, when it was really was a psychological orientation toward the way history and politics have framed our metaphysical sense of the irrational.