Additional Notes on the War

Georges Bataille; Annette Michelson

October, Vol. 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing.
(Spring, 1986), pp. 29-31.
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Additional Notes on the War

Disconcerting Reactions to the W a r

The difficulties inherent in the passage from a state of chaos to one of
organic existence and to the right of command are of a complex nature.
Not only are the masses still unaware of the irreconcilable opposition between their own cause and the mental paralysis prevalent in political committees, but the poorly conceived, confused deals concluded among party leaders
on all sides have not reduced the general tension; they have led viable movements, one after the other, to a dead end.
As to our foreign complications, the Right is mainly responsible for the
policy of enslavement of the German people, and now, when its results are beginning to demonstrate the radical absurdity of that policy, the Right has passed
the task of defending it on to the Left. The Left, supported and actually spurred
on by the Communist far-Left, has, without a moment's hesitation, assumed
the defense of the most inhuman treaty ever imposed upon a free people- and
this without even the justification of the effectiveness of the crueler clauses. The
Right and the far-Right have thus abnegated one of the essential components
of their wretched victory; they cease, in the eyes of their constituents, to embody armed violence, girded for the turbulent expression of the nationalist will
to greatness. At the same time the Left, adopting the policy of radical Germanophobia traditional on the Right, abandons its mission of furthering harmony
among peoples.
We can even go so far as to say that a human policy, free from that mass
excitation which must inevitably end in slaughter, might very well gain from a
present minority of those naturally inclined to the Right, a reception lacking
within the majority of the masses on the Left.
There is no question of our defending the posture to which French nationalism, in its senility, is driven, that "sacred self-interest" to which it is reduced,
that renunciation with which it faces a world clamoring for life. In a time of
total disturbance, nothing exceeds the ignominy of that puerile abdication. The
very beasts of prey, in their natural cruelty, seem less inexcusable than the

OCTOBER

legendary ostrich, reduced to hiding its head to cut off sight. Setting aside that
facile agitation that enlists the spineless in organizations such as l'Action
Fran~aiseor La Croix de Feu, those with an appetite for effective action, those
hitherto kept aloof by their own interests from the Left's solutions, begin to
realize that neither an exhausted nationalism nor a shattered capitalism offers
any way out.
Every possible solution finds individual supporters, without any precision
of expression or value of attraction which might lead one to foresee its predominance. No effective will compatible with a truly human freedom and no will to
freedom compatible with effective will has produced an assembling of even embryonic strength. The balance of opposing forces seems to result in a kind of
equilibrium, since no one force is so constituted that it can even tentatively respond to the needs signaled by general anxiety; the situation, tense though it is,
must for a long time remain so. There is as yet no really obvious way out, none
that tempts the mass in its increasingly agitated state.

Revolutionary Agitation and World Consciousness

It can be asserted that in today's France, political agitation cannot call
upon a permanently depressed national consciousness incapable of aggressive
action. It is, therefore, only insofar as men appeal to the realities of world consciousness that the mass can be stirred. At first, this appeal is bound to appear
trivial. World consciousness, far from evoking strength and the possibility of
the organic state, can be expressed only in anxiety.
Born of extreme misfortune, delivered wailing, by cannon fire in the depths
of a war-muddied earth, the consciousness of human solidarity still burns and
depresses, like fever. Thus far we have known unity among men of different
nations only in circumstances of extreme irony, at those moments of universal
enslavement in the work of mutual butchery.
But who is to say that the mass of humanity is never to feel that violent
emotion which alone can liberate men from the national slavery and frenzy
which send them to their death? Who is to say that we shall never see, assembled
upon this earth, crowds, caught up together in a trance, rising to end the idiocy
of patriotism?
Men today are overwhelmed by an awareness that if nations are allowed
to wage wars for the safeguard of interests wholly unrelated to the common interest, life will become wholly impossible. Now, you cannot spread this elementary truth among mankind without proposing that it take up arms directly
against oppression. The Russian Revolution took on its full meaning when it
liberated the masses from a slaughter that was totally oppressive. A revolutionary cohesion, an organic cohesion will be possible in France only if men know
that they are fighting to deliver the world from all those who have given it over
to war. What was made possible in Russia by an extreme decline of authority

Additional Notes on the War

will, however, be realized here only through a revolutionary increase of authority. Only a firm and coherent power which has eliminated all opposition could
face the world with clarity, with unparalleled disinterestedness, with the will to
cohesive union among all peoples of the world.
It must be acknowledged as a general principle that an imperative strength
develops most fully in relation to a sense of inferiority. The inferiority complex
of the leader has always played a role in the development of his determinant action; as a rule, an odd lack of self-confidence on the part of history's dynamic
leaders has driven them to those antithetical excesses required to prove to
themselves how unjustified this lack of confidence was. Similarly, we can claim
that national feeling achieves that extremity of pride and assertiveness only in
those countries in which doubt or anguish has arisen; that assertiveness and
confidence are thus the function of prior doubt and fear.
We cannot, of course, claim that those who reflect world consciousness
are necessarily carried to power by the existence of that doubt and anguish, but
the force with which the demand is laid down immediately unshackles them. If
a real movement were to be generated by an anguish of this dimension, it would
necessarily assume the ardent, unpredictable, highly courageous character of
the great religious movements which have in the past overwhelmed whole
peoples with the revelation of the universal value of existence. If men were to
come forward and declare that the time has come to lift the age-old curse which
haunts the human race, can we doubt that their voices would ring out with a
sudden, shattering force, that very force now demanded by a whole world in
anguish? Out of man's present extreme impotence, tomorrow can bring forth
only a POWER containing the resolution of an absurd and ancient destiny - or
misfortune in the extreme. . . .*

The text breaks off here. -trans.