Performance of Negation, Negation of Performance: Death and Desire in Kojève, Bataille and Girard

Abstract

If philosophies of modernity characteristically invoke themes of loss (of God, traditional social authorities, epistemological and discursive norms, etc.), much modern philosophy is distinguished by a kind of discursive reflexivity, or poetic license, that allows such loss to be rhetorically rehearsed, and its subtler implications probed, rather than merely lamented. Nietzsche's Frohliche Wissenschaft, to take a paradigmatic case, does not simply proclaim death of God, but puts proclamation in mouth of a crazy man who also, in snowballing self-contradictions, continues to seek by light of a lantern held out to illuminate the bright early morning.1 To neglect such rhetorical texturing of doctrine is to overlook distinctive elevation in significance philosophical discourse has won in wake of modernity's loss of stable epistemological and moral norms. As Nietzsche's account of crazy man attests, whatever may be truth of modern predicament, at stake in assessments of that truth is not only doctrinal validity, but also practical and aesthetic sustainability of kinds of discursive performance a given doctrine allows. Nietzsche's rhetorical account of death of God suggests that objective assertion of God's absence pales in significance relative to its implications for subject who would make that assertion. Indeed, Nietzsche indicates that propounding that assertion only