A Story of Rats

Abstract

Although Georges Bataille (1897-1962) wrote only uncompleted theoretical texts on “abjection” that remained unpublished during his lifetime, he remains a key, if often hidden, figure in the contemporary discourse on abjection, forming one basis of Julia Kristeva's seminal, psychoanalytically informed work in The Powers of Horror. Inspired by Bataille's anti-systematic thought, this paper eschews linear argumentation in favor of an abject mode of writing that sketches obscure associative connections between two stories of rats: Bataille's novella The Impossible (with its “Story of Rats”) and Freud's case study on the “Rat Man.” In doing so, the paper takes up Pierre Klossowski's formulation of the “simulacrum,” advancing the idea that Bataille's “abjection” is simulacral—not a closed, well-delineated concept, but a notion that always opens up beyond itself, forever slipping, spilling, and shifting, thereby performing the very action of abjection. Bataille's performative simulacrum of abjection is read in relation to his notion of the “formless” as elaborated by Rosalind Krauss, as well as Kristeva's theorization of “abjection.” This investigation of notions of abjection and the formless generates associations and meditations on possibilities for thinking and performing abjection in the wake of Bataille.