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A Story of RatsJeremy BilesPublished online: 13 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Jeremy Biles (2014) A Story of Rats, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 19:1, 111-125,DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2014.908090

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111PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 19 ·1 : pp .111-125ht tp : / /dx .do i .o rg /10 .1080/13528165 .2014 .908090

The story of abjection is a story of rats.

But ‘story’ is misleading. In fact, there is no story of abjection. Abjection has no cohesive narrative, no plot, no clear beginning, no destiny or destination, no sense of an ending. It exceeds the domestic and domesticating economy of narrative.

My title, torn from a section of Georges Bataille’s book The Impossible, is therefore as inappropriate as Bataille’s own ‘Story of rats’ in that book. Bataille describes his ‘story’ as a ‘notebook’ (1991: 15). It is less a proper novella than a collection of notes, fragments – the duplicitous ruminations and anguished searchings of an obsessive mind expressing itself from behind the mask of fiction: at once a document and a simulation of delirium.

Bataille’s non-story doubles and folds in on itself. In ‘telling the story of the rats’, Bataille in fact tells ‘two stories’, both of which describe the exploits of a man of perverse excesses called ‘X’.

In the first story, X lies on a bed beneath a lace covering. ‘Role-players’ and an elevator man attend to him in the bedroom. The elevator man presents X with a cage containing a live rat. ‘Setting the cage on a pedestal table, the elevator operator would arm himself with a hat pin with which he would pierce the rat. At the moment when the pin penetrated the heart, X would soil the lace cover.’

The second story finds X in a ‘basement brothel’ where he asks the proprietress, ‘Do you have any rats today?’ The proprietress indeed has rats, ‘nice ones’, ‘enormous rats’, because X needs ‘huge rats, you understand’. ‘X would then

pounce on an old prostitute who was waiting for him’ (1991: 36–7).

The text of Bataille’s story is riddled with holes and obscure passages, marked out graphically by ellipses and parentheses. In these gaps, the unutterable announces itself like so many droppings on the page: ‘(Even the . . . . . . . . of elegant personages has the hugeness of a rat.)’ (1991: 38). Ink spots, staining the page: a graphic as filthy in its implications as that which it is meant to hide.

Bataille writes of ‘the elusive transit of a rat’. He goes on: ‘What fascinates us is vertiginous: sickly smells, recesses, the sewer, have the same illusory essence as the void of a ravine into which one is about to fall. The void also attracts me, otherwise I wouldn’t have any vertigo – but I will die if I fall, and what can I do with a void – except fall into it?’ (1991: 38).

Scatophilic, expulsive, anal eroticism; violence and death; the fascinating mingling of attraction and repulsion: all these converge in Bataille’s strange story of rats. The evocation of abjection in disgusting smells, shadowy corners and corridors, the subterranean passages through which shit passes all partake of the ‘illusory essence’ of the void – that is, the seductive nothingness before which one experiences the impulse to throw oneself away: end of story, with no sense of an ending.

(Bataille’s story of rats does not conclude so much as break off with a parenthetical apothegm evoking death, sex, and disgust: ‘[Nakedness is only death and the tenderest kisses have an aftertaste of rat.]’) (1991: 81).

A Story of RatsAssociations on Bataille’s simulacrum of abjection

J E R E M Y B I L E S

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So this ‘story’ of rats, like the rodents themselves, multiplies, proliferates, folds, tracing an ‘elusive transit’ through the sewer’s fetid labyrinth of desire. Perhaps the story of abjection can only be told from multiple, shifting vantages.

If abjection in all its ambiguous fascination partakes of an ‘illusory essence’, it is irreducibly anamorphic and heterogeneous. It is less a concept than a term around which associations accrue and disperse, less a well-formed idea than a simulacrum of a notion (see below), with no clear boundaries. It is vermicular, polymorphous, fragmentary, slippery – and biting.

Abjection has no story, but it does have teeth.

‘The notion of a rat is inseparably bound up with the fact that it has sharp teeth with which it gnaws and bites’ (Freud 1963: 54). Freud makes this observation in telling his own story of rats – though, again, it is not really a story, but ‘notes’ on a case of obsessional neurosis, including ‘extracts’ from the case history of an analysand famously dubbed the ‘Rat Man’.

Freud’s case histories, like Bataille’s fictions, are notebooks – irremediably incomplete. Freud marvels at the smooth narratives his contemporaries manage to produce in writing up their own case histories. But one senses that his marvelling is really an expression of suspicion. He does not believe that complete, integral narratives can be created from the intractably mutilated material of patients’ psychic lives. Freud confesses that his own case studies remain riddled with gaps.

One may see in these gaps so many tunnels through which rats shall pass, circulate, communicate.

Gaps = connections.

The Rat Man is haunted by a ‘rat story’ (1963: 51), but one he cannot bring himself to complete – another broken narrative that ‘concludes’ with a void, a silence.

An officer in the army, the Rat Man is subjected to a description of a ‘specially horrible punishment used in the East’. The description comes from a superior officer, a captain with

an enthusiasm for corporal punishment. He is ‘obviously fond of cruelty’, the Rat Man remarks (1963: 12).

Freud recounts the Rat Man’s attempts to relate the horrific mode of punishment of which he has heard tell:

‘… the criminal was tied up …’ – he expressed himself so indistinctly that I could not immediately guess in what position – ‘… a pot was turned upside down on his buttocks … some rats were put into it … and they …’ – he had again got up, and was showing every sign of horror and resistance – ‘… bored their way in …’ – into his anus, I helped him out. (1963: 13)

Like Bataille’s story of rats, the Rat Man’s story in Freud’s text is punctured by ellipses, dashes – interruptions at the point of simultaneous horror and desire – for the Rat Man’s obsessional neurosis is shot through with a dreadful ambivalence. Freud reveals that in telling the rat story, his patient’s face ‘took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware’ (1963: 13.). The mingling of attraction and repulsion – reminiscent of what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘powers of horror’ – is likewise both a response to and constitutive of abjection in Bataille’s texts. Abjection compels ambivalent affective and intellectual responses.

In the course of the Rat Man’s analysis, Freud reveals the chain of obscure, unconscious associations that account for the elusive transit of the rat in the analysand’s psyche. ‘Rats,’ Freud observes, just before admitting he can only ‘give a very incomplete account of the whole business’, ‘had acquired a series of symbolical meanings, to which … fresh ones were continually added’ (1963: 52).

Freud then gives voice to the Rat Man’s unspeakable associations in all their labyrinthine, unconscious logic, traversing the gaps in the Rat Man’s discourse. The doctor lapses into a lucid but nearly maniacal accounting of the patient’s hidden, obsessive associations – an analytic effervescence symptomatic of succumbing to a sympathetic

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contagion in which the analyst falls victim to the powers of horror, doubling the Rat Man’s own hyperassociative and unconscious trains of thought.

The rat’s transit – so many associations, so many turns: the rat carries its delirium like a disease from patient to doctor – must be tracked at length, its nodes, junctures and vertices underscored:

What the rat punishment stirred up more than anything else was [Rat Man’s] anal eroticism, which had played an important part in his childhood and had been kept in activity for many years by a constant irritation due to worms. In this way rats came to have the meaning of ‘money’.1 The patient gave an indication of this connection by reacting to the word Ratten [‘rats’] with the association Raten [‘installments’]. In his obsessional deliria he had coined himself a regular rat currency. When, for instance, in reply to a question, I told him the amount of my fee for an hour’s treatment, he said to himself (as I learned six months later), ‘So many florins, so many rats.’ Little by little he translated into this language the whole complex of money interests which centered round his father’s legacy to him; that is to say, all his ideas connected with that subject were, by way of the verbal bridge Raten–Ratten, carried over into his obsessional life and became subjected to his unconscious. Moreover, the captain’s request to pay him back the charges due upon the packet served to strengthen the money significance of rats, by way of another verbal bridge Spielratte, which led back to his father’s gambling debt.

But the patient was also familiar with the fact that rats are carriers of dangerous infectious diseases; he could therefore employ them as symbols of his dread (justifiable enough in the army) of syphilitic infection. This dread concealed all sorts of doubts as to the kind of life his father had led during his term of military service. Again, in another sense, the penis itself is a carrier of syphilitic infection; and in this way he could consider the rat as a male organ of sex. It had a further title to be so regarded; for a penis (especially a child’s penis) can easily be compared to a worm [Freud will also compare the rat’s tail to a worm and thus a penis], and the captain’s story had been about rats burrowing in some one’s anus, just as the large round-worms had in his when he was a child. [Moreover, ‘according, then, to his earliest and most momentous experiences, rats

were children’ (1963: 54, my emphasis).] Thus the penis significance of rats was based, once more, upon anal eroticism. And apart from this, the rat is a dirty animal, feeding upon excrement and living in sewers. [Freud writes of his patient, ‘He dreamed that he saw my daughter in front of him with two patches of dung instead of eyes’ – a further association with excrement (1963: 41).] It is perhaps unnecessary to point out how great an extension of the rat delirium became possible owing to this new meaning.

… [I]t became impossible to escape the inference that in many of the shapes assumed by his obsessional deliria rats had another meaning still – namely, that of children…. Once when the patient was visiting his father’s grave he had seen a big beast, which he had taken to be a rat, gliding along over the grave. He assumed that it had actually come out of his father’s grave, and had just been having a meal off his corpse. The notion of a rat is inseparably bound up with the fact that it has sharp teeth and bites. But rats cannot be sharp-toothed, greedy and dirty with impunity: they are cruelly persecuted and mercilessly put to death by man, as the patient had often observed with horror. He had often pitied the poor creatures. (1963: 52–4, my emphasis)

Freud has been bitten by the phantasmatic rat, contracting the rat’s disease. The rat is the carrier of a contagion – a contagion of associative delirium, of elusive, obsessive transits.

Thus articulating the Rat Man’s delirium, Freud himself submits to the rat delirium as well – a lucid, analytical delirium – his text a document and simulation of a little madness.

The gaps in the Rat Man’s story occasion Freud’s connections. Analysis – ‘breaking up’, according to its etymology – is also a mode of connection. Passages, textual and transitional: gaps that instigate connections: the openings through which meaning(?) passes, and passes away.

Transit of the rat delirium:Rat – anal eroticism – worms – money –

gambling – disease – penis – worm (again) – tail – excrement – sewers – children – grave – corpse – meal – teeth – persecution – horror – pity – death.

1 Freud famously connects anal eroticism and money. For an elaboration of this connection, see Sándor Ferenczi (1994).

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The transit of the rat culminates in horror, pity – and death.

Bataille echoes the Rat Man’s horrified ambivalence:

A child’s scream, a cry of terror and yet of intense happiness.

Those rats that come out of our eyes2 as if we dwelled in tombs….’ A. himself has the dash and character of a rat – all the more alarming because one doesn’t know where he comes from nor where he makes off to.

[…]‘[I]f now I think – at this most far away moment

of a breakdown, a physical and moral disgust – of the pink tail of a rat in the snow, it seems to share in the intimacy of ‘that which is’; a slight uneasiness clutches my heart. And certainly I now that the intimacy of M. who is dead, was like the tail of a rat, lovely as the tail of a rat! I knew already that the intimacy of things is death (1991: 38, 54).

Like the rat, Bataille’s notion of abjection follows an obscure transit; one does not know where Bataille comes from or where he makes off to with this notion. Abjection seems to be at once everywhere and nowhere in Bataille’s writings….

Bataille’s most sustained explicit treatment of abjection is in an ‘essay’, unpublished during his lifetime, entitled ‘Abjection and miserable forms’. More precisely, several fragmentary essays appeared under the rubric of abjection, forming more of a notebook towards ‘essays on sociology’ than a definitive theorization of abjection.

‘Abjection and miserable forms’ focuses on abjection as a sociopolitical phenomenon. In schematizing the matter of oppression, Bataille distinguishes between the category of oppressors – those who achieve and maintain ‘sovereignty in its individual form’ through the ‘imperative forces’ that impose prohibitions – and those who undergo oppression, a category comprising the ‘heterogeneous region (which alone escapes the principle of compensation); in the domain of heterogeneity, subversion has repercussions only […] insofar as the stability of this domain depends on the general rules of oppression established by a given society’ (Bataille 1999: 9).

The heterogeneous society is the ‘basic element of subversion, the wretched population, exploited for production and cut off from life by a prohibition on contact’ – in other words, the ‘dregs of the people, populace and gutter’ (1999: 9). The ‘human refuse’ of which Bataille speaks (1999: 10) arouses disgust in ‘homogenous society’ – a feeling that translates a ‘threat’ to the ‘imperative attitude’ that reduces humans to things (10, 11). A threat and a contagion – for ‘human abjection results from the material impossibility of avoiding contact with abject things: it is but the abjection of things passed on to those who are exposed to them’ (11).

Drawing upon psychoanalysis, Bataille links abjection with ‘anal eroticism’. But whereas anal eroticism is ‘a composite of positive and negative attitudes’, the ‘imperative act of exclusion’ is ‘strictly negative’ (12). The ‘general tendency to exclude impurity then manifests itself in the form of the cruelty exercised on the person’ (13).

To be clear, Bataille is not condoning such cruelty. He is never on the side of power; he never seeks to impose the will to power in some quest for purity.

Rather, as becomes apparent with reference to Bataille’s wider corpus, Bataille is seeking to theorize dual aspects of abjection: as the reduction of humans to servile things through imperative acts of exclusion – a reduction that he resists; and as the liberation of humans from the condition of servility through subversive acts of abjective transgression – which he condones).

These dual aspects of abjection may be compared with the double meanings of sovereignty and the sacred in Bataille’s writings: the noble sovereignty of individualized power that consolidates and elevates the sacred into its transcendent, right-handed dimension (e.g., the king, the fascist leader, ecclesial hierarchies); and the sovereignty that Bataille links with the left-handed sacred in all of its subversive impurity – the will to chance, loss of self and dissolution that escapes servile ‘use’ and threatens sociopolitical institutions and structures: wound, decay, rupture, fall.

2 The ‘rats that come out of our eyes’: what to make of this image of the eye – that organ of supreme lucidity – expulsing vermin? Pineal eye … rotten sun … an icarian fall … desublimation … debasement … a vision of excess …

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In Bataille’s lexicon, ‘abjection’ has a double meaning. There is, on the one hand, what we might call ‘servile’ and regulatory abjection: ‘The rich man consumes the poor man’s losses, creating for him a category of degradation and abjection that leads to slavery’ (Bataille 1985a: 125). This subjugation founds and maintains the social system. To this Bataille opposes what might be called heterological abjection: the revolt of the impure, the dangerous forces of pollution, the return of the oppressed: ‘Class struggle … becomes the grandest form of social expenditure when it is taken up again and developed, this time on the part of the workers, and on such a scale that it threatens the very existence of the masters’ (126).

It is Bataille’s essay from which Julia Kristeva draws the epigraph that in some sense founds her own project on abjection in Powers of Horror:

Abjection … is merely the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding abject things (and that act establishes the foundations of collective existence).

The aspect of exclusion, of expulsory prohibition, is central to Kristeva’s account. As she writes, again calling upon Bataille:

Georges Bataille remains the only one, to my knowledge, who has linked the production of abjection to the weakness of that prohibition, which, in other respects, necessarily constitutes each social order. He links abjection to ‘the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding’. Bataille is also the first to have specified that the plane of abjection is that of the subject/object relationship (and not subject/other subject) and that this archaism is rooted in anal eroticism rather than sadism’ (1982: 64).

Though Kristeva lifts up Bataille’s insights into the ‘logic of prohibition’ that ‘founds the abject’ or is responsible for the ‘production of the abject’, some commentators have pointed out that Kristeva’s conception of abjection in fact quickly diverges from Bataille’s; he seems to be invoked as an authority only to be abandoned….3

Bataille forwards neither a conclusively elaborated theory nor an integral concept of abjection (‘It is impossible to give a positive definition which is both general and explicit, of the nature of abject things’ [1999: 11]) so much as he proffers a simulacrum of abjection, if by ‘simulacrum’ we take Pierre Klossowski’s understanding of the term as it applies to Bataille’s thought: ‘The simulacrum has the advantage of claiming not to stabilize what it presents of an experience and what it says of it: far from excluding the contradictory, it naturally implies it’ (Klossowski 1995: 148).

The simulacrum implies a dis-closure, an incessant wounding of an idea that might otherwise threaten to close. The simulacrum ‘open[s] notions beyond themselves’ (1995: 150). It is the germ of thought, the dis-ease of thought caught in the act of being thought. It is thought as open experience – more an excretory function than formative enclosure: thought as performed rather than stabilized: an idea in process.4

The simulacrum thus suggests a movement – a mobilization of thought, rather than an ideational crystallization. The movement of the simulacrum is one of burrowing, following unforeseeable twists, gathering and shedding meanings….

A simulacrum is thought pursuing the rat’s transit.

In dealing with abjection, we must follow the rat, succumbing to its contagion, allowing new associations continually to accrue around the term.

But abjection in Bataille is at once a movement of loss as well as of generative excess. Following Klossowski, and now returning to Freud, we must take ‘abjection’ in Bataille’s writings as a ‘complex stimulus-word’, formed through an ‘inexplicable process by which [this] obsessional idea’ circulates (Freud 1963: 54, 55), usually without showing itself, without being pronounced: the rat in the shadows, as eager to bite as it is prone to being wounded. (When the rat rears its head, it often loses it; see below.)

3 Sylvère Lotringer raises this matter in his interview with Julia Kristeva, ‘Fetishing the abject’ (Lotringer and Kraus 1999: 15–35). See also Hal Foster et al. ‘The politics of the signifier II: A conversation on the “informe” and the abject’ (1994). This conversation is treated below.

4 Compare to Kristeva’s ‘subject in process’ (Kristeva 1998: 133–78).

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Propositions:Abjection must be theorized abjectly (and as

a simulacrum, a complex stimulus-word).Abjection is a linking and germinative term in

Bataille’s lexicon, an often-invisible Ariadne’s thread, a term of circulation, a term ‘defined’ in its circulation, its erratic transit.

Abjection is always abjecting itself into, or alongside, other terms. Its flight can be observed, but it is known only by its traces, its droppings, marks of its absence: thus a kind of non-knowledge. To say it is known is only to say it is experienced, in the process of being thought or enacted. Abjection produces itself in leaving, in its leavings.

Abjection is a term that circulates, but exceeds the circulatory system. It disburses itself; it gets itself disbursed. (The economic metaphor here is intentional; the simulacrum of abjection … the opened-out ‘notion’ of expenditure … an accursed share.)

Abjection does not declare ‘there are no boundaries’ but rather registers a sacred horror at the breaching of those boundaries. It gnaws at the boundaries. (And this gnawing is doomed to fail, abjectly. Always a minor, i.e., fleeting and usually local, rupture, whether sudden [explosive] or slow [decay]. [But how might such ruptures reverberate, shaking up the cultural institutions that by Kristeva’s account are both predicated upon and necessitate abjection?]) Abjection, exclusion, subversion: Bataille wants to resist the imperative forces by which the ‘disinherited’ are deprived of the ‘possibility of being human’ – in some sense to relieve those who suffer the process of abjection from their suffering (Bataille 1999: 11). At the same time, from the point of view of his wider work, it is clear that a subversive force is attached to abjection – a force akin to that of the left sacred. Thus a doubling of abjection in Bataille: both a miserable state and a possibility for (social, political, psychological, aesthetic) rupture. The duplicity of abjection.5

The teeth of (Bataille’s) abjection: never a will to power. A force from below (a rupture) and to the below (a burrowing). Chthonic: Dionysus in rodent form. The sparagmos reconfigured

as a puncturing, a crushing. The ‘force’ of abjection as a mark of ‘low’ sovereignty; low sovereignty v. the ‘high’ sovereignty of power, of transcendence, of authority (see ‘sovereignty’, below). The mole v. the eagle. The left sacred v. the right sacred. Sovereignty conceived, in Bataille, neither as mastery and the exertion/imposition of power, but as that which in its uselessness and waste – its abjection – escapes the systems upon which power is predicated and maintained. ‘A certain “ego” that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master’ (Kristeva 1982: 2). Useless, beyond structure – and formless?…………

For Kristeva, abjection is a form of negative ecstasy (from ek-stasis, being beyond or beside oneself), summoning and tearing at the human subject. She writes:

there looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.… Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and pulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. (1982: 1)

According to Kristeva’s theorization, the abject – more precisely, the process or operation of abjection – founds subjectivity; it is that which must be excised, expelled, repulsed, wasted, thrown away ‘in order to be an I’ (Foster 2001: 153). ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself’, she writes (Kristeva 1982: 3). One must get rid of oneself in order to be a self at all.

‘… (but what is this primordial I that expels in the first place?)’ (Foster 2001: 153).

Does not this parenthetical question reveal abjection as a preposterous concept? (Preposterous: from Latin praeposterus, ‘absurd,

5 One might consider, on this point, Giorgio Agamben’s problematic and reductive reading of Bataille’s theory of sacrifice in relation to victims of the Holocaust and the lingchi torture (Agamben 1995: 112–15).

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contrary to nature, inverted, perverted, in reverse order’. Literally, ‘before-behind’, pre- and post-.)

Thus the vicious circle, a primal spiral, a primordial tautology: I must rid myself of that which, in order to be an I at all, I must always already have expelled. A preposterous time, a vertiginous space – the time-space of pure falling. The time-space of the corpse.

Kristeva:

The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death…. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live…. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver…. [t]he corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. (1982: 3)

Disgusting waste, the decaying corpse: the chance that we become, into which we fall. Bataille had already written of the ‘will to chance’, linking it, via an etymological labyrinth, to decay, waste, death, the corpse. Trained as a medievalist, Bataille, like Kristeva, would have been familiar with the Latin root of ‘corpse’ – cadere, to fall. He also would have noted that from this root derives décadence (decadence/decay). Chance is the fall, the death, the corpse. Extending this obscure transit, Bataille writes:

Chance, in French, has the same origin (cadentia in Latin) as échéance (‘deadline’). Chance échoit, that is, it turns out to be the case. Or it just falls, tombe (like good luck or bad, originally). It is the randomness of dice as they fall. (1992: 70)

Is the corpse – of a human or a rat – an abject thing? What things, what objects or substances, can be abject? Kristeva claims, at the very outset of her account, that ‘the abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I’ (1982: 1). And yet is not the corpse, by her account, the quintessential abject object? ‘What

is abject’, she writes, ‘the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me towards the place where meaning collapses’ (1982: 2). Menstrual blood, semen, pus, vomit, tears, spit, mucus … not so much objects as substances, and not so much particular substances as substantial forces that break down borders, that sully clean ideas, that operate to disintegrate form. Abjected, they threaten, and in threatening, they become repellent, fearful, repulsive: abject. The preposterous tauto-logic of abjection.

Bataille’s writings on abjection are sporadic, far-flung, fragmentary, incomplete, unpublished during his lifetime. ‘All the pages Bataille wrote under the heading of abjection were left unfinished; they were textual failures, published posthumously’ (Hollier in Foster et al. 1993: 4). These pages on abjection scurry and hide, remaining obscure in comparison with his theorizations of sacrifice, the sacred, the formless, the general economy…. In other words, his writings on abjection were and are, in some sense, themselves abject.

Do Bataille’s writings on abjection thereby reveal something about the performance or operation of the abject?

In other words, what is abjection like for Bataille?

The formless is ‘like’ a spider or earthworm or spittle (Bataille 1985b), but perhaps the abject is not like anything at all – except maybe a rodent, a rat. The rat of abjection nonetheless shares much with the formless. Like the worm, the rat burrows. And like spittle, the rat is apt to be seen less as a cleanly delineated form than gross substance, disgusting remnant, particularly when, like the spider, it gets itself crushed everywhere – in traps, under car tyres. But again like the spider, the rat bites.

The abject has no emblem, it is allied to no particular thing, no substance, no object, in the usual sense of that term – yet the qualities and symbolic associations of a rat make it an apt carrier of the abject. The rat is a metaphor of abjection, a metaphor in its full, archaic sense

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– from the Greek for carry, transfer, alter or change. The rat carries abjection like it carries disease. It instigates transferences, alterations, through a logic of contagion.

To paraphrase Bataille’s essay on the informe, ‘abject’ is not only an adjective, but a term that performs: it rejects, repulses, throws out and throws away. What it designates has no rights, because it is that which has been rejected, or has rejected all rights: what’s the difference, finally? And if the abject, in being thrown out everywhere, is therefore nowhere, this amounts to saying that the abject is like a rat, both crawling and crushed, biting and debased.

To affirm that the universe is formless is to affirm it is in perpetual abjection – so many rats in an endless sewer.

The abject is a rat crushed under a car’s tyres. The crushed rat is disgusting refuse, ‘pure’ waste (see below on purity).

The abject is revolting, in a double sense: repellent and in a state of perpetual revolt.

Abjection is the rat’s revolt.The abject, the rat, is against architecture, to

borrow a phrase from Denis Hollier. It burrows beneath structures (or gets ground down and spat out by them.) Whatever abjection ‘is’, it is in deceptive form. A simulacrum, a parody of form, the jolt of the revolting.

…………

Chicago. Cold autumn rain. Elevated train tracks, dumpsters, walls stained with graffiti, a swamp of filthy water forming around a clogged grate. I’d come to this nowhere spot, not yet at my destination, via an alley. My eyes fell upon a massive rat – freshly crushed, judging by the dark red viscera forcibly expulsed under the pressure of a car’s tyre but not yet washed away by the rain.

X marks the spot: a parody of geometry: the diagonal corpse of the rodent, framed against a sodden slab of cardboard.

I retched at the sight.

Another rat, a few summers ago, also made me sick. I was in a different alley on a cloudless day, with tricked-out biplanes and vintage military aircraft passing overhead from the Air and Water Show. I was cleaning the area around my apartment building’s garbage cans, where debris accumulates, attracting the rats for which Chicago’s alleys are so well known. The battle is never-ending; the rats can never be eliminated, only more or less held at bay.

Shovelling garbage into the cans, I heard a high-pitched wail issuing from some low place along the alley’s edge. I traced the sound to its source. A neighbour had evidently set out traps; the clamp of one of them had crushed a corner of the screaming rat’s thorax. There was no way to release the terrified creature (it was an unconventional trap with an internal locking mechanism). Trembling and with tears in my eyes before a grim necessity, I lifted the shovel. At that moment, I looked up to see the Blue Angels, their F/A-18 fighter jets in perfect diamond formation, soaring overhead, splitting the sky ahead of their thunderous wake: a vision of military sovereignty. I returned my eyes to the ground, bringing the edge of the shovel down upon the rat. The squealing ceased, but my trembling did not.

…………

(How to move beyond ‘abject art’ as a ‘thing’ of the nineties? Isn’t the abject something that continually, inevitably, returns, always newly uncanny [always beyond the uncanny,

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according to Kristeva], always in relation to the shifting boundaries of art, culture, economics, technology and our bodies? ‘The problem that goes “on and on without stopping” is, fundamentally, the abject’ [Jones 1993: 42]. A pragmatics of abjection.)

The question of abjection and performance,

and of performing abjection.And abjection’s proximity to the formless,

specifically Rosalind Krauss’s theoretical elaboration of the formless?

Bataille … Kristeva … Krauss: triangulating a stratagem.

…………6

6 The above pages are excerpted from Bataille’s essay ‘The use value of D. A. F. de Sade’ (1985).

Kristeva writes of various registers or ‘modalities’ of abjection. She names transgression, denial and repudiation – all linked to negation (1982: 6). Following the rat, we might add: crushing, debasement, disgust, pollution, obscenity, contagion, (the body itself?)….

By Rosalind Krauss’s estimation, Kristeva’s abjection remains too closely tied to essences, substances, objects – to bodies, in short. She launches a shot at Kristeva in her conclusion to the momentously influential book Formless: A user’s guide, co-authored with Yve-Alain Bois in conjunction with a landmark exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In her concluding

essay, Krauss seeks rigorously to differentiate abjection from her favoured Bataillean concept, the formless.

In her critique, Krauss treats Kristeva’s concept of abjection as if it were itself abject – threatening the conceptual borders that she, Krauss, wants to delineate and uphold. Krauss wants to address and resist the ‘currency of present-day interest in the concept of the formless’ as usurped into ‘the insistent spread of “abjection” as an expressive mode’. Krauss sees abjection as a contagious concept, prone to spreading, infecting the formless. Abjection, Krauss insists, ‘must be differentiated in the strongest possible terms from the project of the formless’ (Krauss 1997a: 236).

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

■■ Annotated pages from Bataille's essay "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade" (1985). Reproduced with the permission of the University of Minnesota Press. All underlinings, marginalia, etc. are the author's.

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Krauss wants to ‘think “abjection” apart from the objects of disgust – the filth, the rot, the vermin, the corpses – that Bataille himself enumerates, after all, in his own treatment of the subject’. She wants to pry abjection away from the production of ‘a thematics of essences and substances’ (1997a: 245).

Her point is made even more vociferously in a widely cited conversation among several art-critical elite published in October under the title ‘The politics of the signifier II: A conversation on the ‘informe’ and the abject’.7 There one finds Krauss and her Formless collaborator, Bois, eager to distinguish the formless and abjection in the most strenuous terms.

One discerns in Krauss’s criticisms the expression of a struggle for laying claim to some master category in Bataille’s writings. But no such category exists. Even patently ‘central’ terms like death and excess are not so much well-delineated, centralized/centralizing concepts as shifting or opened-up notions, nexuses around which meanings variously accrue, cohere, alter, open and proliferate. They lend Bataille’s thought its theoretical cogency (his lucidity on certain points is unmatched) while also precluding conceptual closure (Bataille writes the ‘limit experience’). They both illustrate and partake of the general economy of Bataille’s thought.

(Blanchot: ‘A strange surplus. What is this excess that makes the conclusion ever and always unfinished?’ [Blanchot 1998: 46]).

… Bataille’s innovative, unfinished essay into the theorization of abjection … his use of the term ‘abjection’ and its cognates varying from one context to another … with each iteration, the term (and its legion associations: shit, cadavers, vomit; rats, moles, flies; excess, expenditure, the accursed share; transgression, sacrifice, death: the sacred in its left-handed aspect) follows its own course, accumulating and shedding meanings along the way … leaving so many droppings in its wake … whatever ‘meaning’ it takes on, it takes on

through associative logic, the logic of dreams, of subterranean circulations, unconscious connections indistinguishable from the gaps through which they move….

…………

7 Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Helen Molesworth are the discussants.

■■ Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man 1492. Pen, ink, watercolour and metalpoint on paper. Height: 343 mm (13.5 in). Width: 245 mm (9.65 in).

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A few days after my initial encounter, I returned to the site of the crushed rat. It was now more thoroughly flattened, its body bearing the marks of tyres. More disturbingly, the rat had lost its head.

Thus is established an association between the headless rat, its guts exuding from a ruptured body, and Bataille’s Acéphale, as rendered by André Masson. Lacking a head and presenting a wounded torso with twining intestines, Bataille’s headless deity is a hideous, ridiculous parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, icon of anatomic-architectural integrity. In place of the genitals is a skull. In the Acéphale’s right hand, a flaming sacred heart–pomegranate–grenade. In the left hand, the sacrificial blade.

The Acéphale, neither man nor god, but a wounded ‘monster’, the cheerful victim of auto-mutilation, lost in the labyrinth of its own intestines.

The Acéphale, beyond all ‘self-interest and the obligation to work’ is pure waste, pure excess. As useless as a crushed rat.…

…………

N O T E S U P O N A C A S E

Fragments and Associations‘The politics of the signifier II: A conversation on the ‘informe’ and the abject’8

Foster: ‘I hate to say it, but the three of you [Krauss, Bois, Buchloh] have collaborated on a story that feels almost claustrophobic, as hermetic, as the old narrative.

Is there a story of rats coursing through, and below, the prevailing, hermetic story, gnawing at it?

Bois: In Bataille it is a circulation of objects or substances that perform, in each case, a function in a structural manner. They are not reified as this piece of matter, that bodily fluid; they are objects set up in a situational opposition.

‘Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth’. So writes Bataille in ‘The solar anus’. He immediately adds: ‘But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy’ (1985a: 5).

The question of Bataille’s attack on metaphor in relation to the copula: to say that I AM THE SUN is to succumb to sun-sickness, an infection, a solar contagion. It is to receive the excessive gift of the sun, a gift Bataille will equate with exuberance, surplus energy – and madness.

Metaphor as madness, as matter, as mutilation.

‘At first sight, it is easy to recognize in the economy – in the production and use of wealth – a particular aspect of terrestrial activity regarded as a cosmic phenomenon. A movement is produced on the surface of the globe that results from the circulation of energy at this point in the universe’ (Bataille 1988: 20–1). The sun is the source of this energy, and the sun ‘gives without receiving’, expending itself, casting itself off endlessly, with no hope of return. ‘Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe’ (29). A sacrificial expulsion, an incessant solar excretion – hence the ‘rotten sun’ of which Bataille speaks, the sun whose excess withers and blinds those who scrutinize it. An exceeding of the restricted economy: ‘A surplus must be dissipated through deficit operations’ – operations whose very function is to bypass utilitarian thinking that would calculate in the interest of self-preservation, profit and security (22).

Excess energy, the accursed share, must be wasted, cast off, destroyed. An insane, irrational prospect, an insuperable imperative indicative of solar madness.

8 In this section, all boldfaced quotes are drawn from ‘The politics of the signifier II’ (1994).

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A madness such as infected Vincent Van Gogh, in the ‘overwhelming relations he maintained with the sun’ (Bataille 1985a: 62). And again, the sun – the very image or metaphor of the idea/l – is dangerous. Thus its ambivalence: ‘Even the ideal carries within itself something of the deformities of which it is the exasperated antithesis’. The sun is glorious, but also ‘deleterious and sick’ (66).

The ‘equivalence of opposing elements’ is linked with Van Gogh’s self-mutilation, the excising of the ear. Like the solar gods who tear out their own organs, Van Gogh and those who likewise succumb to the madness of the sun experience ‘the necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself’ – that is, to abject oneself (67). (Towards a pragmatics of the abject, a performance of abjection?)

Might we here find here both a difference from Kristeva and a critical response to Krauss’s concern regarding thematization of the abject? For Van Gogh’s abjection is a performance, a ritual, not in service of purification, hygiene and a shoring up of the boundaries of the self,9 and neither is it purely a structural operation. ‘The rupture of personal homogeneity and the projection outside the self of a part of oneself’ will have the effect of alteration. ‘Such an action would be characterized by the fact that it would have the power to liberate heterogeneous elements and to break the habitual homogeneity of the individual, in the same way that vomiting would be opposed to its opposite, the communal eating of food’ (70).

‘Repugnance is only one of the forms of stupor caused by a horrifying eruption, by the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume. The one who sacrifices is free – free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim, to vomit his own being just as he has vomited a piece of himself … free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself’ (70).

Such an interpretation ‘cannot … be contested when it is considered as an immediate association’ (67).

A matter of madness, the madness of matter. A metaphor.

Bataille’s rage against metaphor is a rage against a certain use of metaphor, namely, as part of a ‘game of transpositions’ that either sublimates (recuperating the low and making it high) or symbolizes (establishing a given meaning). As Barthes has shown, Bataille does not refuse all metaphor but rather makes it function transgressively.

In Bataille’s text, metaphor is not reified but is rather akin to matter, more precisely base matter, stripped of any idealized aspect and charged with the power of horror. And it is in identification with this charged matter that one escapes, if only briefly, the ‘great ontological machines’ constructed by human reason.

Molesworth believes, with Krauss, that Kristeva ‘uses the abject to reify certain bodily products’ (Foster et al. 1994: 5). But perhaps these products are not so much reified as to be taken in the register of what Bataille calls ‘base matter’, matter that, in its ineradicable, irrecuperable lowness, ‘is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations’ (Bataille 1985a: 51).

On the other hand, what base materials have not been recuperated into high art, have not found a place in the museum system? Shit, blood, vomit, semen, even corpses: it’s all there, all incorporated. See Bataille on appropriative homogenization. What would an art of heterological incorporation look like? Is such a thing possible? Is the performance of the abject a possibility for a genuinely heterological operation?

Hollier: The concept of abjection should be linked to the order of the performative…. It is not simply epistemological; there is essentially a pragmatics of abjection. As far as I remember, this is the weak point of Kristeva’s thematizing approach. When it is linked to specific objects or substances, when it becomes a classificatory problem, the subjective element, the position of the subject in a pragmatic reaction disappears.

One may wonder whether the insistent accusation against Kristeva regarding her supposed ‘thematizing approach’ is the

9 See ‘The sacrificial mutilation of Vincent Van Gogh’, where Bataille rejects the hypothesis that religious automutilations and other ablations are motivated by a ‘desire for hygiene’ (1985a: 68).

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result of a tendentious reading that has gained momentum through repetition by authoritative voices like Krauss, Hollier and their cohort. Is Kristeva’s account in Powers of Horror as thematizing, as tied to substance, essence and the body, as Krauss and company repeatedly suggest?

And is the abject, as theorized by Kristeva, without any link to ‘the order of the performative’, or what Krauss and Bois call ‘operation’? On this point, it is not exactly clear what Krauss takes to be the borders defining the performative, pragmatic or operational aspects of the formless. In the essays in Formless, she insistently links the operational dynamics of the formless with a ‘mechanistic structure’ (1997b: 197). (Her key reference on this point is Barthes’s structuralist essay on Bataille, ‘The metaphor of the eye’.) For Krauss, operation, and thus a kind of performance, is keyed to structure; the operation of the formless undoes structure.

And yet, what gets lost in this debate (can one still call it a debate, or are we here exhuming the corpse of a debate, to inspect its decay?) is that for all of Krauss’s proclaimed repugnance at (Kristeva’s thematizing approach to) the abject, there is really only a slight increment of difference between Kristeva’s abjection and Krauss’s informe – for Krauss collapses the categories of operation and structure, while for Kristeva the category of the abject speaks precisely to abjection’s place vis-à-vis a structure, a system. Even as expulsion is necessary for the system, for identity, that which is abjected also operationally threatens the expelling system by calling into question the barriers of distinction that define the system as such.10 This is, under one of Krauss’s construals, the very ‘job’ of the formless. As Bataille says, the informe is a term to ‘bring things down in the world’, to declassify. And Krauss theorizes ‘a system constructed within the definition of the informe: a procedure to strip away categories and to undo the very terms of meaning/being’ (Krauss and Bois 1997b: 155). A procedure, in part, of abjection? (Kristeva: the abject is where ‘meaning collapses’.)

Krauss gives no heed to the performance of chance in Bataille except as the outcome of the ‘mechanistic structure’ as exemplified in Barthes’s reading of the metaphorics of Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Although hers is an intriguing reading of this aspect of the tuché in Bataille, in her attempt to differentiate Bataille’s ‘chance’ from the ‘objective chance’ of Breton and the surrealists – with its ‘working out of desire’, putting it in the ‘service of love and of a voluntarist relation to reality’ (Krauss 1997b: 197) – she forgets (suppresses? represses?) what Bataille himself explicitly writes about chance. She forgets about the fact that Bataille wrote a book, On Nietzsche, that was subtitled, volunté de chance: the will to chance.

Krauss suppresses, in other words, what forms the major meditations on chance in the text of Bataille, extrapolating instead from Barthes’s essay to Bataille’s thought in general. Yet, what Bataille’s writings on chance reveal is a profound relation with the abjectifying subject position theorized by Kristeva. Chance, for Bataille, can be read as a moment of the operation of the informe, but also as keyed to abjection.

For Bataille, the ‘will to chance’ is the will to fall, to risk death and nothingness: cadere, to become the cadaver: the pragmatics of abjection.

Perhaps what we have in Krauss’s resistance to Kristeva’s abjection is the narcissism of small – minuscule – differences. In abjecting abjection, Krauss must abject some aspect of Bataille, in whose name she claims to be writing.

Krauss: Now if you just say it’s shit, all the vectors that a structure lets him [John Miller, with reference to his Untitled 1998 piece] set up in the work – between the huge ball, for example, and the tiny house on top of it – get lost.

Molesworth: This vectoring is lacking in a lot of work now championed around the

10 For a discussion of the proximity of these terms that has animated some of the ideas here, see Hegarty (2006).

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notion of abjection. There is the sense that the abject can only be represented through its most direct referents.

For all Krauss’s emphasis on the processual and performative nature of the formless, she appears to have little interest in investigating performance art as a field for the operation of the formless. Vectors of abjection are opened in part by the enactments of abjection in performance art. But Krauss’s admitted phobia about the body – the human body that so much performance art engages, often at a visceral, haptic, literal level – and its literalization in art would seem to blind her to the other modalities of abjection available to performance art.

Hollier: All these concepts in Bataille are tied to a problem that is subjective as well: it is the subject that is abject. That is where his attack on metaphoricity comes in. If you die, you die; you can’t have a substitute. What can’t be substituted is what binds subject and abject together. It can’t simply be a substance. It has to be a substance that addresses a subject, that puts the subject at risk, in a position from which it cannot move away. […] And that is why the informe must always be linked to some kind of pragmatics, to a performative gesture that ties subject and abject together. […] Bataille’s dark utopianism and his obsession with the abjection of the defeated, with the fact that the abject, resisting metaphorization and displacement, can never be put on display.[…] The abject cannot be shown; it cannot be told either, because of the ineradicable metaphoricity of language.

‘… cannot be told …’ (cannot be part of an epistemological project): therefore an apophasis of abjection?

(An apophatic writing concurrent with an obsessive return …)

Compare Bataille’s ‘inner experience’. A method of meditation. ‘Methods’ of abjection? Non-knowledge. Language, silence. Language and/as mis/conception. I.e., language as

abjection. (Artaud, for example.) Associative logic. Primary processes. ‘Delirious’ use of psychoanalysis. ‘Talking cure’. Talking sickness. Talking as silence. Silence as ……………

Theory. Metaphor. Analysis: (contagion of the rat)

Risk – wound – rupture – communication. A breaking-apart to establish bonds. ‘“Communication” cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another. It requires individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked, placed at the limit of death and nothingness’ (Bataille 1994: 19). The will to chance.

…………

‘… the intimacy of things is death’. ‘… the intimacy of that which is …’ ‘… intimacy is violence …’ (Bataille 1992: 51)

…………

Another alley (always an alley, the space of the urban unconscious), another rat. Again, crushed. This one with its eye fully enucleated, popped from its socket. A story of the eye – made abject? The rats that come out of our eyes, the eye that comes out of the rat….

Always the return of the rat (‘… an aftertaste of rat …’).

Always the return of abjection. Turning to it, and away from it. But it never holds together.

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And it leads nowhere. Always an escaping and a returning, a wounding and binding, and always at the same time: preposterous.

(Or – as the title of Bataille’s text containing the ‘Story of Rats’ would have it – Impossible.)

R E F E R E N C E S

Agamben, G. (1995) Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Bataille, G. (1999) ‘Abjection and miserable forms’, in Sylvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus (eds) More & Less, New York: Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia: 8–13.

Bataille, G. (1988) The Accursed Share, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone.

Bataille, G. (1991) The Impossible: A Story of Rats followed by Dianus and by The Oresteia, trans. Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights.

Bataille, G. (1994) On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, New York: Paragon House.

Bataille, G. (1992) Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone.

Bataille, G. (1985a) Visions of Excess: Selected writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bataille, G. (1985b) ‘Formless’, in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 31.

Blanchot, M. (1998) ‘Affirmation and the passion of negative thought’, in Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds) Bataille: A critical reader, Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Ferenczi, S. (1994) ‘The ontogenesis of the interest in money’, in Sándor Ferenczi, First Contributions to Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac.

Foster, H., B. Buchloh, R. Krauss, Y.-A. Bois, D. Hollier and H. Molesworth (1994) ‘The politics of the signifier II: A conversation on the “informe” and the abject’, October 67 (Winter): 3–21.

Foster, H. (2001) The Return of the Real, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Freud, S. (1963) ‘Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis’, in Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, New York: Macmillan.

Hegarty, P. (2006) ‘As Above So Below: Informe/sublime/abject’, in Andrew Hussey (ed.) The Beast at Heaven’s Gate: Georges Bataille and the art of transgression, New York: Rodopi: 73–80.

Hollier, D. (1989) Against Architecture: The writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Jones, L. C. (1993) ‘Transgressive femininity: Art and gender in the sixties and seventies’, in Jane Philbrich (ed.) Abject Art: Repulsion and desire in American art, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, pp. 33–57.

Klossowski, P. (1995) ‘Of the simulacrum in Georges Bataille’s Communication’, in Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (ed.) On Bataille: Critical essays, New York: SUNY Press.

Krauss, R. (1997a) ‘The destiny of the informe’, in Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A user’s guide, New York: Zone, pp. 235–52.

Krauss, R. (1997b) ‘Uncanny’, in Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A user’s guide, New York: Zone, pp. 192–7.

Krauss, R. E., and Y.-A. Bois (1997a) Formless: A user’s guide, New York: Zone.

Krauss, R. E., and Y.-A. Bois (1997b) ‘Part Object’, in Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois Formless: A user’s guide, New York: Zone, pp. 152–7.

Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, J. (1998) ‘The subject in process’, in Patrick French and Roland-François Lack (eds) The Tel Quel Reader, London: Routledge: 133–78.

Lotringer, S., and C. Kraus, eds (1999) More & Less, New York: Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia.

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