‘Man’ is a little thing that has learned to stammer the word “infinity.”
“The separate being,” Georges Bataille writes, “is precisely a thing in that it is separated from itself: it is the thing and the separation” (1989, 75). Psychoanalytically-speaking, this “separate being” would correspond to the ego, which in so far as we come to understand it, equates to a feeling of certainty and autonomy, of being “marked off distinctly from everything else” (Freud, 1930, 66). But this, Freud plainly states, is deceptive: “[t]he feeling of our own ego is subject to disturbances,” he writes in Civilization and its Discontents, “and the boundaries of the ego are not constant” (Freud, 1930, 67). The ego, in other words, is not a distinct entity, but the projection or perception of unity where it is uncertain, unstable, unr/Real.
As a point of departure, Freud offers examples of this instability: the relation between the ego and the unconscious mental entity of unlimited or, at least, unplumbable depth, as well as the relation of the ego towards a loved object, which threatens to dissolve boundaries to render the two entities one. But in this text, Freud is less concerned with how the ego operates as necessary narcissistic fiction and more so with the alienation that takes place around this psychic architecture, less with the attachments and identifications that give the ego shape, and more so with the processes of differentiation and separation that precipitate this fiction or fantasy. In a rather uncharacteristic way, he writes:
… the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a more inclusive – indeed,
Page 7an all-embracing – feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.
This “primary ego-feeling” – associated with a feeling of limitlessness or oneness with the universe, wherein something like an ego is perhaps not discernable at all – Freud describes as oceanic, borrowing the term from a letter written to him by French poet and mystic Romain Rolland in response to The Future of an Illusion. Therein Rolland accepts Freud's critique of religion and the juvenile nature of prevailing forms of belief but clarifies that Freud's analysis neglects the “the true source of religious sentiments” which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,‘ an experience of the limitless and unbounded – une sentiment oceanique .
Freud is willing to acknowledge that this ‘oceanic’ feeling exists but finds uncompelling the claim that it might be regarded as the source of religious need, insisting that the motives for religious tendencies lie instead in infantile helplessness, the desire for submission to a superior power, and the narcissistic wish of an ego to endure beyond death. “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself,” Freud (1930, 65) confesses, nor does he feel able to “work with such intangible quantities” (1930, 72). Classing the ‘oceanic’ as a sensation which defies scientific characterization, Freud concedes that “nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational content most readily associated with the feeling” (1930, 72). And it is here that I wish to introduce a caveat, namely that the ‘oceanic’ suggests to us the altogether absence, perhaps even the irrelevance, of ideational content as such. In fact, I would argue, this “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (1930, 65) seems to suggest the very emptying out of the centrifugal circularity of language and subjectivity, those mutually constituted contrivances that provide the “I” its pseudo-stability on the condition of difference and separation.
Freud does not conceive of this outpouring of self, perceiving in its place an affirmation of inferiority and the consolation it offers to a feeble
or tenuous ego. By Rolland's approximation, however, the ‘oceanic’ is quite contrary to the desire for eternal self-preservation: it is a situation of intense contact and free vital upsurge, a state of constant flux opposed to the immortalization of the “I” and, as such, a limit of reason rather than its opposition.
Following Rolland, Freud associates the ‘oceanic’ with religious sentiment, but I suspect it also shares profound affinities with Freud's most speculative concept. Introduced nearly a decade earlier in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death drive marks a crucial turning point in the drive theory through the positing of an aim whose deferral sustains the entire psychic economy. And yet, despite the fact that he postulates the aim of the death drive as a restoration of a primordial situation of non-existence, Freud draws out no relation with the ‘oceanic.’ We might attribute this to his scepticism on the matter or to the fact that he associates the ‘oceanic’ with psychic content of some sort whereas death, he maintains, has no place in the unconscious. Still, the unboundedness of the ‘oceanic’ – wherein the individual is no longer discernable as such – also seems to connote a collapse or dispersion of the ego and its objects. However in the place of the “zero” associated with the death drive, it describes a situation of pre-ambivalent fullness or oneness.
It would seem that here, in the absence or dissolution of its object and mode of inquiry, the enterprise of Freudian psychoanalysis begins to disintegrate. But I would argue that such a disintegration is not a mark of theoretical failure, but a position in and of itself. The irrepresentability of death need not present a fixed limit. Rather, we might take this irrepresentability as death's characteristic feature: a situation of silence or impossible closure accessible only as the forfeiting of language and subjectivity, that is to say the forfeiting of individuality as a function of difference. In other words, the loss of the discursive subject can only be articulated as the impossibility of articulation.
According to Derrida (1987) for instance, the only means of expressing the death drive, in psychic life as well as textual performance, is through
the postponement of any conclusion. In “To Speculate – On Freud,” he proposes that the nature of the dynamic between the life and death drives, though not explicitly stated, is written into Beyond… through the textual movements by which Freud expresses the interdependence of the drives without ever positing it as such. According to Derrida, the text performs the impossibility of arriving at a destination as each example and explanation of the death drive given by Freud confounds itself and forces the text to begin again. But this is by no means intended as a criticism. Quite the contrary: it is this “diabolical” movement that allows the text to approach the subject at all, offering a conclusion of sorts precisely by not offering it as such. Therefore, according to Derrida, the thesis is actually the absence or deferral of a thesis – its athesis – as found in the unsettling rhythm of the text: the case for the repetition compulsion, itself caught in an interminable repetition.
Freud cautions the reader, qualifying what he attempts to put forth in Section IV of Beyond… as “speculation, often far-fetched speculation” (24). Derrida however defends speculation as a peculiar intellectual operation, radically different from hypothesis, theory, or observation in that it reflects a certain “aimlessness” of thought. But perhaps aim-inhibition would be more precise. Freud touches on this mechanism briefly in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), in which he puts forth the preliminary drive theory that is radically revised with the publication of Beyond… five years later. He describes as aim-inhibited those “processes which are allowed to make some advance towards instinctual satisfaction but then are inhibited or deflected” (122). Although Freud has not yet introduced the death drive at this point, he has clearly considered the idea of partial satisfaction of an aim-inhibited drive perpetuated through repetition, as also suggested by his 1914 paper “Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through.” Like the libidinal and self-preservative drives later to be grouped under a common life principle, Freud's theory itself seems to be demanding the death drive – a ‘first and final drive’ whose aim (i.e. ultimate satisfaction in the complete reduction of tension) is both thwarted and sustained by the life drives through which it seeks partial satisfaction, the drive whose deferral sustains the entire economy. But
what Derrida describes elsewhere as the “inevitable necessity” (, 10) of the death drive will only be expressed through an athesis in the form of theoretical departures and returns, much like the fort/da game that becomes the text's defining episode.
A “specular” logic, in other words, requires an other, indeed projects one when it is not available. Death however is not opposable – it is the negation of everything including negation itself. Without the quality of difference or alterity, it is non-inscribable. The speculation then reflects a particular strategy, the only possible strategy when the “finality cannot be clear, cannot be itself” (Derrida, 1987, 278). Unlike theory, the speculation produces a non-positional structure based on a lack of equivalency. As far as death is concerned, however, it would appear that the speculation is not merely the only available approach, but also the most demonstrative. Like the symptom, the speculation is a response to a forbidden or foreclosed thought that expresses a conflict most fully precisely in the inability to express it verbally. Then, in so far as it is thought, death is the unrepresentable that lies beyond the possibility of difference from life. Or, we might say that death “represents” none other the impossibility of its own representation; as soon as we consider it, Derrida writes, “it is, already, life death” (Derrida, 1987, 285).
What if we move away from an ego- or anthropocentric model? Surely the loss (or sacrifice) of self as point of reference or primary mode of interface does not come at the expense of the so-called “external” world. In the notion of the ‘oceanic,‘ I believe, we begin to discern a post-human current in Freudian psychoanalysis, an attempt to think through or at the very least in the absence or anonymization of the subject.
Here, egocentricity is neither supplanted nor replaced. Rather it gives way to a model without any discernable center at all, one which emphasizes economic or ecological flux in its entirety rather than the integrity of individual components – a turbulent dynamic that can be transposed onto the intrapsychic level on the principle that the very categories of “inside” and “outside” cease to be viable determinants. The
result is not a play of actors but a play of forces, not an opposition but a situation of dependency that is also a mutilation of each of the individual terms – an aquatic mode of thinking wherein one wave is not separable from any other nor from the entire agitation of the water which together they sustain.
Bataille's heterogeneous writings teem with such marine metonymy. “The animal is in the world like water in water” (1989, 19), he writes, defining animality as the absence of individuality that reduces being to a thing. Animality then corresponds to a situation of immanence and intimacy, an experience of the world entirely different from the one mediated by subjectivity and in which the subject ordinarily lives – different precisely because it is experienced as entirety. Beyond difference, this situation is one of radical otherness, one which subverts any form of synthesis, completion, or closure and instead affirms exposure, incompletion, and openness as that which ensures contact through permeability. In other words, the situation described here is not one of intersubjectivity as a mode of interaction mediated by self as opposed to other/ness. Rather, it is one of intrusions and introjection, of mutual contingency and mutilation.
But the human, in so far as he arrives at this through contemplation or consciousness, adheres to his own presence as such. According to a formula repeatedly used by Bataille, the subject veut etre tout – “wants to be all” – but even this desire is sustained by the discontinuous need to survive in an integral form (Libertson, 1990). Bataille stays with this paradox, and the impossibility of this sustained engagement erupts in the convulsiveness of his writing:
In picturing the universe without man, a universe in which only the animal's gaze would be open to things, the animal being neither a thing nor a man, we can only call up a vision in which we see nothing, since the object of this vision is a movement that glides from things that have no meaning by themselves to the world full of meaning implied by man giving each thing his own.
What we have here is an operation that is Hegelian to the point of excess.
Relying on Kojève, whose lectures Bataille attended, we might define Absolute Knowledge as a homogeneous state in which there would be nothing in the external world that is not mediated by mind or there would occur to the mind nothing that does not take place in the external world. The rift between the mind and the world would thus dissolve and this situation of reciprocal equilibrium would mark the ultimate triumph of reason but also, incidentally, “the end of history”: without desire or work there would be nothing to drive the dialectic, and without otherness to ground the experience of consciousness, the entire procedure would theoretically collapse.
But Bataille was unconvinced. In a correspondence with Kojève written in 1937 and published later as “Letter to X” he writes: “I imagine that my life – or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life – constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel's closed system” (1988a, 89). Given this understanding, Bataille might have abandoned the operation of the dialectic entirely, but what he develops instead is a rather complex and deeply uneasy position vis-à-vis Hegel. Bataille's response represents a liberatory struggle to preserve an individual quality – though not exactly the individual as such – against the homogenizing force of the Absolute, emphasizing the incommensurability of thought itself with such a state. Essentially then, what Bataille suggests is a system with neither the possibility of closure nor of realization by the individual as such, the two conditions being mutually dependent. The result is neither an inversion nor a critique of the Hegelian dialectic, but a step further: an approach to the dialectic which foregrounds what Bruce Baugh describes as the “contingent existence of knower” (2003, 84-5). Yet, as in Derrida's reading of Freud, this step forward invariably brings us two steps back.
For Bataille, knowledge is so ontologically conditioned by a knower no knowledge could be complete to the degree required by the Absolute. Furthermore, there is a domain of “knowledge” that can only be experienced as or because of a threat to the integrity of the knower. Thus something akin to the Absolute may exist – Bataille certainly thinks it
does – but no knower may possess it and as a result it is structurally unlike what we associate with knowledge. Consequently, Bataille terms this experience of one's own contingency as a situation of “non-knowledge” or “unknowing”: non-savoir.
This formulation provides a means of “understanding” death as that which is necessarily inaccessible to the operations of thought: the unspeakable excess rendered by a situation of ambivalence and alternation between the desire for meaning and the drive to surpass it. However, the fascination-turned-horror of a transgression that puts one beyond alterity reawakens the desire to install again the limits that one has just surpassed. Death, in other words, is not an ontological category of its own. As such it would be either unviable or fundamentally fraudulent. Rather, it is only “knowable” as the situation of ontological uncertainty that it reveals or the ontological oscillation it evokes.
In Hegel and Psychoanalysis, Molly Macdonald (2014) presents an alternative reading of Hegel that challenges the predominant interpretations of Absolute Knowledge. Framing the reading through the perspective of the Third (Dritte), Macdonald puts forth a bird's-eye view of the dialectic: the constant mechanical shifting between two observed from a position of exteriority as the organic movements of a larger whole. By introducing this witness, she bypasses the overemphasis on the individual trajectories of either lord or bondsman. Rather, she foregrounds the mo(ve)ment in which two terms, mutilated beyond the possibility of recognition (that is, distinguishment) give way to a dynamic interplay between unbound forces, a reciprocal interaction that we might refer to as “intersubjectivity” were it not for its lack of any identifiable subjects.
This interpretation is made possible by the emphasis on the energetics or economics of the system in its totality instead of the integrity of its individual components. In that sense, Macdonald reads into Hegel the play of forces more commonly attributed to Nietzsche. However, she introduces a stipulation that deconstructs dialectical opposition: Force
as Universal Medium. Force, as Macdonald explains, is a unique concept within the Phenomenology: “in order for it to ‘be, it must be completely set free from thought,’ it must be allowed to exist and function without meddling from any process other than its own” (2014, 25). That is, Force cannot be ideated or iterated: it manifests as its own existence, bound or unbound, and corresponds to the multiplicity, potentiality, and changeability of form rather than any given form as such. By reading the movements of the dialectic through the differentiations of Force, Macdonald puts forth a model capable of considering the negation of the subject on the principle that doing so does not lead us into the field of abstract negativity. Undergirded by non-differentiation, such a model signals the radical otherness most foreign to individual thought. However, in this interpretation the absence of the individual does not assert itself as a mourning. Instead it gives way to a reuptake in the form of an experience of oneness with the whole.
“Force,” Macdonald writes, “is the movement of ‘matters,’ of moments, of objects that causes them to leave their individuality behind, becoming one with other(s), only to break this unity back up into its particularity and then start the whole process again” (2014, 29). Thus, Force functions as a transitional material between particularity and unconditional unity: no force is inherently different to its “other” but an opposition is produced so that one might arrive at the realization of the absolute-as-impossible through consciousness (i.e. self-consciousness) which is always an awareness of difference.
The juxtaposition of this energetic model with Freudian metapsychology allows for an otherwise interpersonal dynamic to be transposed onto the intrapsychic level. In this way, the monadic (though internally divided) ego can be substituted for the movement of self-consciousness as a process of binding-unbinding-rebinding. As in the psychoanalytic schema, the subject is at once bound to itself, to its own process of consciousness, and to the external world. But the emphasis on a general energetic economy privileges the porousness of these implications rather than the subjective self-perception they sustain. In foregrounding externalization as a necessary movement of thought,
this interpretation addresses the impossibility of theoretically isolating death or narcissism. However, by taking a primordial condition of non-differentiation as the “starting point” Macdonald supplants the fight for recognition as the hinge of the Hegelian dialectic. Focusing instead on an episode through which the whole is restored to itself by the mutual permeations of its particulars, this hermeneutic allows us to think two “impossible” variables – loss of the subject and totality – as functions of their reciprocal dependency. Sacrifice, in other words, is also the means of fusion, and this equivalency fills an otherwise conceptual void by re-imagining it as a situation of superfluidity. What would otherwise appear as abstract negativity is formulated as an energetic flux that is mobile, mutable, and total.
It is my impression that the variegated lines of reasoning of this paper converge here and might be summarized as follows: death operates as the “vanishing mediator” that never quite vanishes, the elusive “third term” of a psychic economy of binding and unbinding forces, driven by the latter but only able to posit itself through recourse to the former. Death, by this reading, would be that which insists and through that insistence (i.e. the impossibility of its re-uptake by the system) maintains the system in motion, the first struggle reproduced again and again, always equal to itself and yet never quite the same. As the aim of a drive then, it would correspond neither to a “return to zero” nor to “the end of history” – both of which reflect terminal conditions – but rather to an affirmation of the grounding non-differentiation out of which forms proliferate and into which they dissolve so that the process might begin again. Repetition and remainder.
To square this in Bataillian terms we would say that the insufficiency of the self signals more than a constitutive lack: it is also that which ensures contact with the other, not only through the intersubjective dynamics of reversal, introjection, and identification, but also as a form of porous communication. That is, the narcissistic wound as a cause of mourning, anxiety, or anguish is also the means for an ecstatic transmission unrestricted by the formalism of subjectivity, what Bersani describes as “an intransitive pleasure intrinsic to… a self-subtracted being” (2010, 48).
Indeed, as both Bataille and Bersani suggest, such a transmission occurs precisely through the fissure in subjectivity that otherwise propels desire and relationality, however it exceeds both of those functions as determinants of difference.
And yet, I reiterate, concentrating on non-determination as that which constitutes identity as its own non-existence leads us down a theoretical dead end. After all, how to produce evidence of a negative proposition? Macdonald's interpretation, however, puts into Hegelian terms one of the fundamental precepts of Bataille's work: the communication or fusion of difference made possible by the openness of non-determination, a situation that cannot be described in terms of the appropriation of the other nor the expropriation of the self because what is foregrounded instead is a total situation of mutual and mutable permeability. This hermeneutic reconciles the anti-philosophical Bataille with the impenetrable Hegel because it supposes a totality that is profoundly heterogeneous: instead of taking difference as the valued term in opposition with sameness or homogeneity, such a model takes the two to be complements and complices that can be synthesized by establishing the primacy of contact and its porousness. Thus, we displace (and abstract) the site of mutual constitution, privileging not the subjective “self-object” in relation to its other(s) but rather, the irrepressible energetic flow between non-differentiation and the differentiated forms that emerge out of that pre-existing situation and make it, at least to some degree, conceivable.
Borrowing from accelerationist Nick Land, we might describe this approach as libidinal materialism. With features of Lyotard's libidinal economy (1993 [1974]) and Deleuze and Guattari's complexity theory, Land's theoretical approach is not the first 0f its kind. It is, however, the only such interpretation couched in Bataillian rhetoric, and for that reason is of particular interest here.
All three perspectives share an emphasis on the productivity of differentiating force in relation to the secondary position from which non-differentiation might then be considered. This idea emerges in Deleuze's writing as early as 1962 and is carried through in collaboration with
Guattari in both Anti-Oedipus (1983 [1972]) and A Thousand Plateaus (1988 [1980]), where it culminates in an exploration of the thresholds at which matter achieves self-organization. Free of transcendent agents, this model of identity-producing difference refuses any effort at totalization through a decentralization of dialectical contradiction. “Pluralism,” Deleuze writes, “sometimes appears to be dialectical – but is its most ferocious enemy, its only profound enemy” (1983, 8) and with the rhizomes and assemblages of complexity theory, he and Guattari endeavor to deterritorialize opposition. However, in light of the theoretical frameworks outlined thus far, such a model leaves us wondering: without friction, how do we account for movement?
We find a comparable difficulty in attempting to transpose Lyotard's libininal economy. Though Lyotard's elevation of the energetic component of the unconscious is much in line with the general economic view of the drives being elaborated here, his framing of representation as a local effect of libidinal intensities does not quite allow us to account for the importance of representation in Freudian and Lacanian theories of ego/subject-formation. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard employs the concept of libido at its most diffuse in order to replace ego- and anthropocentric considerations with a more ecological/energetic interpretation. It is my impression, however, that such models cannot quite accommodate psychoanalytic speculation, at least not without an element of disingenuousness, and this is what sets Land's libidinal materialism apart.
Following Bataille, Land takes into consideration what is at stake when privileging the decentralized and deregulated flow of energy between matters, namely subjectivity itself. In other words, this thinking can only be experienced as a crisis for/of the thinking subject. This reading re-inscribes subjectivity as the sacrifice that such a perspective implies and demands. Thus, the “self” is somewhat retained, if only as its disintegration and loss, and this allows for the possibility of recourse to psychoanalytic thinking, if only through a consideration of its limitations.
In his elaboration of libidinal materialism, Land identifies this mode of interrogation as one that is thematically psychoanalytical but
morbidly and perhaps even “irresponsibly” so in its “enthusias[m] for the accentuation of intensity that will carry it through insurrection into anegoic delirium” (1992, xx). Like Deleuze and Lyotard, he speaks to a compulsion to abstract civilization and subjectivity into tides of impersonal energy, a model that operates largely according to thermodynamic principles however, as Land explains, it has no predicates: “in contrast to the energy of physical thermodynamics, libidinal energy is chaotic, or pre-ontological” (1992, 43). In this view, chaos is the irrepressible flux of compositions and being (or rather becoming) is its effect. This, Land argues, is against Lacan's foregrounding of lack, as well as the Platonic or Christian positing of an end to desire. Actually, he describes this view as closest to Freud's “dissipative energetic flows,” a return to Freud that is especially relevant here given that it is discussed in the context of Bataille's peculiar nihilism.
Libidinal materialism, it would appear, accounts for the associative link between Freud and Bataille. But Land is wary in this regard. In a way that both echoes Bataille's view of his own work as “failure” and encapsulates the implicit or inhibited complexity beyond the level of signifiers in the Freudian texts, he writes:
No one could ever ‘be’ a libidinal materialist. This is a ‘doctrine’ that can only be suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought. It is a hyperlepsy of the central nervous-system, ruining the body's adaptive regimes, and consuming its reserves in rhythmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating.
The totality then might be expressed as that which “is truly alien to ordinary reflection in that it includes at the same time objective reality and the subject who perceives objective reality” (Bataille, 1991, 115). Just as the emphasis on Force-as-Universal Medium supplants the individual trajectories of the lord and bondsman, here too we see a foregrounding of
the relation of form to itself made “possible” through the positing of an energetic flux that is true to its existence in either form or formlessness and as such presents a contestation to essence. By this understanding, opposition is produced so that one might arrive at the realization of the whole or Absolute through the experience of the particular. And yet, so long as one arrives at the whole through (self-)consciousness, it is always-already as a result of the initial experience or perception of difference. The result is as glaring as it is inescapable: the subject as such cannot access or accede to the totality of the whole.
Death, in turn, insofar as it manifests in psychic life ‘oceanically,’ would suggest the demise of the individual principle rather than of being as such. It would therefore represent a Third: not a term in binary opposition to life, but the entirety of a precarious system which cannot be grasped from either position, only as the contamination or collapse of the categorical integrity of the two – a “vanishing” mediator. Or, as Freud writes, it is “something that was originally there” and that persists “alongside of what later derived from it” (1930, 68) In other words, death (as the trace of the situation of non-differentiation) has neither evolved nor disappeared, simply given itself to an alternate mode that allows for it to be experienced precisely as that alternative mode's excess, as that which cannot be enunciated but exists as the wordlessness that it engenders as its condition. If we adopt this approach, death is not opposed to the exuberance of life: it is opposed to ontological totalization, corresponding instead to an absence of alterity, an all which leaves nothing outside. This abolition of exteriority is what Bataille describes as continuity – a mode of being without the limits or enclosures of particularity, and whose so-called “ideational content” bears a striking similarity to the Freudian ‘oceanic.’
The specificity of Bataille's dialectic however is the sacrifice of synthesis in favor of tense contamination in which two modes – individual and all – invade and compromise one another while paradoxically retaining the integrity of their difference. Violent alternations roll over one another like the tides as he posits a discontinuous being that, above all else, desires to escape its limits but is constrained to rely on them as a point
of reference; a subject who attempts to exceed a prohibition but whose transgression cannot be other than a maintenance of the prohibition; an intersubjectivity that must abolish alterity but which cannot function as other than a mutual impenetrability (Libertson, 1990). Each relation is more than the opposition of its independent terms can contain; a duality will not hold. Instead, an endless rising and falling wherein the only recurring theme is the absence of any fixed or certain boundaries.
Throughout his oeuvre, though most notably in the Summa Atheologica, Bataille develops this heterology in terms of waves upon waves. From reproducing cells and erotic couplings to sacrificial rituals, Bataille describes situations in which the participating elements are indistinguishable without being the same, not just mutually constituted but together comprised of and comprising the whole. This thalassic thinking does not allow for any sort of identification, but nor does it signify a self-evident field of unity. The result is a mode of contact that is uncontainable, a persistence of the finite but without limit: “no more separate than are two waves, but their unity is undefined, as precarious as that of the agitation of the waters” (1988b, 95-6). In aquatic thinking, it seems, we can discern, however “impossibly” or tenuously, a fluid heterology that beats back against the currents of homogenization and totalizing ontologies. For Bataille, this play between isolation and dissolution is communication at its most open and it is also the very substance of existence: the constant overstepping of one's own bounds in the hopes of reaching the other, of reaching otherness itself.
The sense of the totality then demands an extreme intensity of the most ambiguous sensations, which reveal to us nothing clear or distinct but effect a reversal which “restor[es] things to the immanence from whence they come, to the vague sphere of lost intimacy” (Bataille, 1989, 50). This intimacy, however, is incompatible with the positing of separate individuals and thus is not without the trace of death. It marks “the totality in which man has his share by losing himself” – by losing the abstraction that the isolated individual is, or thinks he is (Bataille, 1991, 116).
These categories – primal unity, final harmony, intimacy, totality – remain in a sense mystical because they evade formalized/formalizable
thought. But the mystical, in so far as it concerns the experience of a totality which lays bare the precariousness of the subject, perhaps can only be articulated in a vocabulary that is energetic or ecological, one which allows us to think, however deceptively, beyond the subject as centre of the visible world.
It seems to me that the totality of what is swallows me, and if it swallows me, or since it swallows me, I can't distinguish myself from it; nothing remains, except this or that, which are less meaningful than this nothing. In a sense it is unbearable and I seem to be dying. It is at this cost, no doubt, that I am no longer myself but an infinity in which I am lost… (Bataille, 1991, 114).
The enigma of the ‘oceanic’ feeling then, is perhaps not enigmatic at all, but rather a very precise description of a most imprecise feeling.