In my previous post I argued that Matthew Sharpe’s review not only compresses but also demarxises and further de-historicises Aymeric Monville’s very short book, which is only ninety pages long, including the new introduction written for the recent re-edition of his book Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche: de George Bataille à Michel Onfray in French.
Monville admits his essay is not properly speaking a book but is rather a « pamphlet ». In French a « pamphlet » is a tract, or a lampoon, making fun of the weaknesses, real or imagined, rather than engaging with the strengths..
Matthew Sharpe continues and intensifies this perspective of viewing his targets, for they are just as much his targets as Monville’s from the outside. He insists on taking Left Nietzscheanism on his own terms rather than on its own, and admonishes the many humanities scholars who have written and taught from an « inside » perspective on Nietzscheanism rather than taking « the requisite distance to stand back and critically assess, rather than simply seeing the world through its lens ».
To buttress this simplistic idea that leftist Nietzscheans see the world through a Nietzschean lens Sharpe singles out Georges Bataille, citing a key passage from Bataille dealing with his methodology (or rather his anti-methodology) for reading Nietzsche. The passage in question is quoted from Monville’s book but the English translation is far from satisfactory. It occupies footnote 2 of Sharpe’s essay:
2. Monville, Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche, 32. “To speak of Nietzsche only has sense from within, and if one repudiates him, we forget what he denied. This proposition is paradoxical, but, in the same way, Christianity makes full sense only for Christians…a detached interest, from the outside, for Christianity would not have allowed us to talk about it, if others had not talked about it from within” (Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1988], XII, 422).
First, there is a slight error of attribution, the passage does not occur in volume XII of George Bataille’s complete works, but in volume XI. The essay it is taken from is titled: « Nietzsche. La théologie et la folie de William Blake » (Nietzsche. The theology and the madness of William Blake)., it was first published in the review Critique in March 1949.
The first sentence of the quote comes in fact at the end of the first paragraph, and the rest belongs to the second paragraph.
In this post I will discuss the first sentence of this quote, concerning Nietzsche, and save my discussion of the rest, on the subject of Christianity, for the next post.
Suffice it to say that Bataille takes the opposite approach to his enemy (I am assuming that Bataille is by no means a « Christian » in the ordinary sense) than that taken by Monville’s lampoon. In both fragments Bataille argues that one must discuss such philosophies that are also ways of life from within, in terms of their strengths rather than judge them from the outside, in terms of their weaknesses. That is what he means by speaking of Nietzsche from within.
The first sentence reads:
Parler de Nietzsche n’a de sens que du dedans, et si l’on répudie, si l’on oublie ce qu’il nia.
I translate:
“To speak of Nietzsche only has sense from within, and only if one repudiates, only if one forgets what he denied.
Notes:
« si » in French means « if », and the original text has « si » twice, generating two conditional clauses and not just one.
« ne…que » means « only », and governs not just the adverbial expression « du dedans » but the two subordinate conditionals, beginning with »si« , that follow.
« l’ » (l followed by an apostrophe) cannot mean « him », it cannot be a pronoun, so it cannot be the direct object of the verb « repudiate ». If that were the case it would precede the verb « répudie« . However, here it precedes the subject « on » and has no grammatical function, but one of euphony.
These considerations radically change the meaning of the passage. The first paragraph is about recusing or rejecting the tribunal that purports to judge Nietzsche « objectively », without any idea of what he was on about, of what his fundamental experiences were. Bataille argues that we can speak of Nietzsche with any hope of understanding him only if we are capable of rejecting, in our reading, the very tribunal that he rejected, as this rejection is part of his meaning. This does not mean that we have to agree with Nietzsche to understand him or that we have to be a true believer, only that we must suspend or put in brackets the presuppositions he uncovers and rejects, and that we must be aware of the experiences that are underlying his words.
AGENT SWARM 