The Profound Complicity of George Batailie's Blue of Noon

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The Profound Complicity of George of Noon David F Bataille's Blue ieni Doctoral Candidale in the De/nirlnienl of Coin/nii alive Lileraliire. iCLA surrealist Much of George of artistic Bataille's a'livre can be seen as a penersion of modes their production extended to various fields of social theory. surrealists art. Whereas Andre Breton in and other juxtapose sudden and incongruous images and objects writing and Bataille. in his more theoretical works, does something similar with concepts and categories drawn from philosophy, political economy, and anthropology. U' hleit liu del. or Blue of Soon, a short no\el first written in 1939. but not published until 1957. brings this technique back into the realm of fiction. adventures of Henri as their The no\el recounts the Troppman and three female characters - Dirty. Xenie. and Lazare -- personal lives seem both to announce and to echo the violence of the coming war. Bataille's Read alongside provocative and ambiguous essay from The Psychological Structure of Fascism. the no\el can be said to foreground the impossible confession of a series of interrelated crimes, from necrophilia to fascist collaboration. is. I It however, in the very act of exhibiting a deep knowledge of culpability and complicity. Bataille subverts the ritual a would argue, that of confession and absolution. Blue of text also explicitly revels in the Noon. then, becomes not only \ery unconfessability of its parody of confession, the transgressions. Indeed. Bataille builds his theor of reading on this parod of the unconfessed and unconfessable crime of complicit with the guilty pleasures of bloodlust. perversion, and the irresponsible trances of Fascist and Nazi tendencies.. Bataille's exploration of fascism's psychological structure pro\ides the key theoretical counterpoint for understanding whatever confession Blue of Soon may offer. The text argues that fascism is a kind of a return of repressed heterogeneous forces, the essay's which are both non-functional and non-assimilable within the social structure. Besides rather ambitious theoretical elaboration of a description of the social structure as a whole 137). argued within the conlluence of anthropology and Marxism, is the text also engages with the specific historical I moment in which Bataille writing. he general strike of February 1934 in Paris marks, for Bataille. a certain collaboration of Bataille fascism and communism against what he considered to be a dying democracy. finds support for his thesis that fascism produces a structural modification of social relations in his assertion that fascism constructs a social structure based on an identity of opposites. Not only does it this modification put the homogeneous in contact with the heterogeneous, fascism society in their also brings about a profound complicity between communism and joining together against the common enem> is of homogeneous democratic Bataille's apparent conclusion to this double-bind calls the affirmation of to what he or subversive forms of heterogeneity (as opposed the imperative impoverished forms):