Saturday 21 July 2012

Bataille and Surrealism: Skepticism and Optimism

"Too many fucking idealists". In the age of Auschwitz and the Gulags, where a black pessimism can seem the only rational response to one's historical situation, it is easy to identify with George Bataille's well-known condemnation of the Surrealists' aim of synthesizing dream and reality. Likewise, if the underground stream nourishing modern thought since Descartes is an increasingly thorough skepticism, Bataille's atheistic mysticism of non-knowledge can seem more absolument moderne than the Surrealist preference for mythic imagination over reason.

But what this condemnation fails to recognise is the way the surrealists had already lived through the pessimism and skepticism of modernity in the form of Dada. That the skepticism of Surrealism was at heart more profound than that of Bataille can be judged from their more complete renunciation of logical argumentation. While Bataille cannot rid himself of the need to explain himself (as he ruefully observed with regard to the sociological impetus of The Accursed Share), the surrealist manifestos are free of anxieties of justification, their criticisms of the age ultimately personal, rather than rational.

Surrealism in fact shows how the most profound skepticism triumphs even over pessimism. Far from being the consequence of his skepticism, Bataille's rigorous refusal of hope, both personal and political, can be seen to result instead from a residual addiction to the idea of being constrained by the bleak truth of reality, a reality in which the surrealist Icarus will be cast back to earth by the dark sun of necessity. By contrast, the Surrealists understood that if nothing is true, everything is permitted - even optimism.

No comments:

Post a Comment