The Poetics of the Labyrinth: Myth and Transgression in “The Solar Anus” Didi Chang-Park 31 March 2017 ABSTRACT: The twentieth-century French writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962) is noted for having challenged the dominant philosophical discourses of his time through a commitment to heterogenous, base, excremental matter. By focusing on that which is by definition incommensurable, Bataille was able to create an expansive, transgressive field of thought resistant to the logical structuration of Hegelian dialectics and more broadly, philosophical modes of objectivity and completeness. While it is tempting to determine the transgressive nature of Bataille’s work by showing how it dismantles or works against a given philosophical framework, I argue that reading Bataille purely in terms of his negativity assimilates the truly disruptive and transgressive aspects of his writing into yet another Hegelian synthesis. I thus propose an alternative approach to reading Bataille that places an emphasis on the mythological poetics of his writing while still seeking to understand his relationship to the Hegelian dialectics which permeate his thought. By reading Bataille’s early text “The Solar Anus” explicitly in terms of its invocation of the Cretan myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur, I examine how the performative poetics of the text allow it to create an expansion, rather than mere negation, of the Hegelian dialectic structure. Chang-Park !2 0. An Introduction to Transgression “Thus, at the root of sexuality, of the movement that nothing can ever limit […]—a singular experience is shaped: that of transgression. Perhaps one day it will seem as decisive for our culture, as much a part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier time for dialectical thought. But in spite of so many scattered signs, the language in which transgression will find its space and the illumination of its being lies almost entirely in the future. It is surely possible, however, to find in Bataille its calcinated roots, its promising ashes.” —Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression” Georges Bataille died in 1962, and it was in the years following his death that the discourses surrounding his works began to proliferate. In 1963, a special issue of Bataille’s philosophical journal Critique was released in his memory, entitled “Hommage à Georges Bataille.” Here, Bataille was finally given the generous intellectual attention which he so often lacked during his lifetime. Among the contributors were his close friends and collaborators André Masson, Pierre Klosowski, Jean Wahl, and Michel Leiris. But also present in the issue were the less personally close, but extremely influential names of Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. Foucault’s contribution, an essay entitled “A Preface to Transgression,” is a text which has persisted today as especially impactful. While framed as an homage to the body of transgressive work that Bataille left behind in his death, “A Preface to Transgression” is largely oriented towards the future: it calls for a mode of philosophical thinking founded on the transgressive, unspeakable force of the erotic rather than on the limiting scope of logocentrism. “A Preface To” rather than “An Elegy For,” Foucault writes of Bataille as the progenitor of an unborn philosophy that replaces the limiting framework of Hegelian dialectics. Thus I begin this paper with a discussion of Foucault’s “A Preface to Transgression” because of the ways in which it exposes the exigency of studying Bataille now, the exigency of studying Bataille now in order to build any future literary or philosophical project of transgression. Foucault begins the essay with the status of sexualité: “We like to believe that sexuality has regained, in contemporary experience, its full truth as a process of nature” (Foucault 29). But Chang-Park !3 as Foucault argues, the truths regarding sexuality as constructed through the discursive frameworks of Sade or Freud have enacted a limiting “violence” upon its numinous transgression — they “denature” sexuality.1 For Foucault sexuality is better represented through religiosity and mysticism than through discursive philosophies, and it is furthermore a phenomenon that lies precisely at the limit of law and of language, making it impossible to encompass through preexisting linguistic forms. Sexuality reveals the gaping inability of a Hegelian dialectical framework to account for, or even to approach, its unspeakable, transgressive nature. And Georges Bataille, with his violently self-obliterating language, is one writer who continually grappled with this difficulty with words that any earnest writer of the erotic must face. As Foucault describes, Bataille’s writing is ultimately self-denying; he escapes a unified subjectivity to exercise the “transgression of his philosophical being” (Foucault 44). Contrasting Bataille with the rationality of Sade, he writes: “Bataille's language, on the other hand, continually breaks down at the center of its space, exposing in his nakedness, in the inertia of ecstasy, a visible and insistent subject who had tried to keep language at arms length, but who now finds himself thrown by it, exhausted, upon the sands of that which he can no longer say.” (Foucault 39). But despite this emphasis on Bataille’s engagement with the unspeakable, with the loss of language, Foucault emphasizes that the future transgression shall be expansive rather than limiting, and is not against language at all. Transgression, Foucault writes, “opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world.” And Bataille’s “‘difficulty with words’ […] should not be identified with the loss of language that the closure of dialectics seemed to indicate. Rather, it follows from the actual penetration of philosophical experience in language and the discovery that the experience of the limit, and the manner in which philosophy must now understand it, is realized in language and in the movement where it says what cannot be said.” (Foucault 51). The closest Foucault gets to describing the form of this not-yet existent transgression comes when he moves away from writing against dialectics to instead describing the space of transgression through various metaphors and images. Moving beyond Hegelian dialectics, 1 “What characterizes modern sexuality from Sade to Freud is not its having found the language of its logic or of its natural process, but rather, through the violence done by such languages, its having been “denatured”—cast into an empty zone where it achieves whatever meager form is bestowed upon it by the establishment of its limits” (Foucault 30) Chang-Park !4 Foucault defines transgression through the form of a spiral: “Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust.” (Foucault 35). Or, alternatively as a circle: Essentially the product of fissures, abrupt descents, and broken contours, this misshapen and craglike language describes a circle; it refers to itself and is folded back on a questioning of its limits—as if it were nothing more than a small night lamp that flashes with a strange light, signalling the void from which it arises and to which it addresses everything it illuminates and touches. (Foucault 44). And in addressing the loss of self that Bataille frequently explores in his work, Foucault writes, “it is at the center of the subject's disappearance that philosophical language proceeds as if through a labyrinth, not to recapture him, but to test (and through language itself) the extremity of its loss.” (Foucault 43). These attempts to describe the abstract spatial form of transgression and of Bataille’s thought are suggestive, but lack elaboration. It is only when Foucault explores the image of the upturned eye as a site of transgression that he explicitly references a Bataillean text, the erotic novella Story of the Eye. But in doing so, Foucault’s own writing becomes increasingly opaque, as he seems to slip into Bataille’s mystical language rather than expanding outside of it. In searching for a way of expanding on the idea of transgression, I have thus chosen to focus on the labyrinth, and not Bataille’s more famous obsession with the eye. Foucault’s brief hint at the relationship between a labyrinth and Bataille’s writerly loss of subject-hood is one that I find especially revealing in understanding how writing itself may enact transgression. The labyrinth, rooted in mythology, is inextricable from textuality, unlike the eye, which concentrates itself into a singular image. The labyrinth symbolizes first and foremost an experience, a traversal, a diachronic process which resists the objectivity of seeing. And in discovering the great degree to which the labyrinth and the associated Minotaur figure in Bataille’s text, I have found it to be as deeply prevalent as the eye in his oeuvre. While the labyrinth and the minotaur are not mentioned explicitly in “The Solar Anus,” nowhere is the labyrinth more textually embodied than in this text, whose very poetic form seems to twist and wind along a labyrinth of thought. I have thus chosen to concentrate on this text as an exemplary instantiation of labyrinthian transgression. Chang-Park !5 I. The Solar Anus At sixty-four sentences in length, “The Solar Anus” (1927) is one of Bataille’s shortest, earliest published texts and perhaps the only one written in its unique form. Terse and aphoristic, philosophical and poetic at once, “The Solar Anus” is fragmented on the page into resounding, declarative lines and sections, nearly strophic. Proceeding via a simultaneously digressive yet tightly structured chain of thought, “The Solar Anus” explores a labyrinthine textual movement that works within a Hegelian framework while subverting it. Although I will argue that it is an eminently transgressive text, it must be acknowledged that “The Solar Anus” unabashedly rests on a Hegelian edifice, as evident from its title, which concatenates two drastically different, heterogenous elements: the bright, high, life-giving sun, and the dark, excremental anus. Yet the Hegelian synthesis is never completed, no neat dialectic movement from the Sun to the Anus to the Solar Anus exists. Bataille does nothing to pin down or point to the essence of the Solar Anus. In fact, the two words never appear in conjunction in the body of the text at all. Bataille explodes the systematicity of his initial Hegelian premises by writing of the “The Solar Anus” obliquely, traversing a tortuous and digressive labyrinth until he arrives at an ecstatic union with the unspeakable figure within. “The Solar Anus” thus represents a perfect literary site for the exploration of what transgression might mean, in relation to Hegel, but also outside of it. And to explore this transgression I engage in a traversal of its textual labyrinth, from start to finish. I will enter into its parodic poetics, the image of the erotic thread which strings the text together. And as I follow this thread I arrive approach the center of the labyrinth, in which the visceral, transcendent violence of sacrifice and the Minotaur coincide with Bataille’s image of the Jesuve and of the Solar Anus. While I attempt to engage with the text as it should be experienced by a reader — tortuously, and with some degree of confusion, there is no way for me to encompass the affective experience of reading and re-reading the text which gives it its affective power. As Bataille scholar Denis Hollier writes, “The labyrinth we discuss cannot be described. Mapping is out of the question. Or, if it is described, it will be like the trajectory described by a mobile; not described as an object but as a traversal” (Hollier 58). I traverse the labyrinth but am still bound by the discrete conceptual frameworks of the thread, the Minotaur, the labyrinth, and other images that I choose to focus upon. As a writer I form not an organic phenomenal experience of Chang-Park !6 the traversal but a crystallized cast. And so I encourage the reader to traverse the labyrinth on their own as well, since there is no experience which may replace the act of reading the text itself, over and over again, swept up in the curling confusion and ecstatic energy which it inevitably invokes. II. The Copulaic Thread Bataille is often associated with his heterogeneity: his attention to the unassimilable excrement, the unspeakable, the perversions of human experience. It is this focus on heterogenous ‘base matter’—that which cannot be reconciled, whether it be the erotic or the excremental—that caused André Breton, in the Second Surrealist Manifesto, to denounce and excommunicate him from the group as an “excrement-philosopher” (Breton 85). And it is precisely this heterogeneity that renders Bataille’s thought incommensurable with any complete system of knowledge, with the totalizing synthesis of a Hegelian dialectic. But perhaps glossed over by this term, heterogenous, is Bataille’s complementary interest in cohesion, in continuity and community. The thread, as manifest in “The Solar Anus,” embodies conceptual cohesion, but still highlights the heterogeneity of the world through its inability to create perfect identifications between objects. Thus by examining the thread as a formal element of Bataille’s text, I am able to explore the tension between system and heterogeneity in Bataille’s language without resorting to a purely Hegelian framework. To understand how the thread functions in Bataille’s text, it is best to follow the thread of his thought organically, as readers, from its very beginning, and to proceed along the text as it is written. Thus, we begin with the first sentence: It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form. (SA 5). Here Bataille begins by positing a world in which all things are parodically equivalent, establishing equivalence, or identity, as the primary driving force of the text. In the sentence following, he extends this parodic notion of the world with the metaphor of the thread, a tying, identifying mechanism: Chang-Park !7 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. (SA 5). The thread presents itself as a tool of logocentrism, its tracings revealing vast connections which would ideally be discoverable “at a single glance.” This totalizing and complete framework takes the appearance of a rigorous system of knowledge. But Bataille quickly complicates this placid notion in the third sentence of the text, wherein he introduces its erotics: 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.” (SA 5). By exercising the cohesive power of the linguistic copula in relation to himself and the sun, Bataille breaks the objective distance exercised in the previous two sentences of the text. The linguistic copula and bodily copulation fuse to form a thread that functions as an erotic force. While Bataille returns to writing under the system of parodic equivalence for much of the text, this third sentence hints at the inherent fragility of such a system, a fragility which is to be exploited at the end of the text. To explore the fragility of the parodic system, and the frustrations in the copulaic thread, we may contrast the ways in which Bataille engages in the act of identification throughout “The Solar Anus.” When engaging with the parodic system, Bataille identifies objects with one another through the act of transformation, specifically by using the conjugate motions of ‘rotation and sexual [vertical] movement:’ Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them. Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground. Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun. The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form. But their polymorphous coitus is a function of uniform terrestrial rotation. (SA 7) Chang-Park !8 The two motions hold together the world with a synthesizing force, existing perfectly within a Hegelian dialectic framework. It is notable that in exercising this notion of parodic equivalence, Bataille consistently brackets the world, standing outside of it as if in the position of a transcendent God. The parodic world also bears no trace of the human — purely natural, even its erotics (“polymorphous coitus”) function in a systematic, non-libidinal manner. Thus the parodic system fails to “determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements;” it essentially reveals nothing about the world in its closed-off, insular completion (SA 6). It is when Bataille attempts to account for the human world that the thread takes on a messier form — rather than using the conjugate rotational and vertical motions to transfigure one thing into another, Bataille exercises the frustrating thread of the copula, to be: An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality. An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love. A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobbing accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love. (SA 6, emph. mine) By attempting to identify one thing with another, Bataille reveals the “irritating” nature of the copula, the inadequacy that results from any effort at total identification. In one sense, the linguistic copula to be reveals the incommensurability of the heterogenous. But this incommensurable heterogeneity also forms an erotic impulse of sorts, as the erotic arises not from the total and complete merging of two beings, but from their lack of unity: “Love, or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager’s vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.” (SA 6). Loneliness and disconnection is highlighted by the copulaic thread, even though it constantly makes attempts to cohere and create embodied connection. The eroticism of the copula is theorized even more explicitly as a fundamental aspect of being in a 1936 essay entitled “The Labyrinth,” wherein Bataille frames the thread under a Chang-Park !9 broader metaphysical framework. He begins by asserting “the principle of insufficiency,” the idea that humans are all insufficient in isolation, and thus bound to existing in a social fabric of some kind. Humans create their individual ipseity, or being, only by becoming parts of larger wholes. Having established the essential social nature of being, Bataille then asks why we remains corporeally separate, and often quite dissociated from one another, unlike the siphonophore, a class of tiny marine animals which are “by itself an autonomous being, yet the whole siphonophore, to which this fragment belongs, is itself hardly different from a being possessing unity.” (“The Labyrinth” 173). The link between humans, Bataille claims, being not perfectly corporeal, is that of language. Language constructs the individual ipse, and furthermore enacts the elusive, nearly erotic connection between humans: “A limited number of exchanged phrases, no matter how conventional, sufficed to create the banal interpenetration of two existing juxtaposed regions.” It is a “biological connection, unstable but just as real as the connections between cells in tissue.” (“The Labyrinth” 174). Bataille calls this cohesion knowledge. The instability of knowledge as created by language puts being in flux, insufficient and unstable in isolation but also unstable in their language-mediated connection with others. Hence being “plunge[s] human beings into a foggy labyrinth” (“The Labyrinth” 174). Human beings are labyrinthine in structure, made through the erotic-linguistic connection of the copula, which in its conglomeration forms the broader structure of knowledge. Thus the thread is both embodied in the flesh and in the mind, connecting humans, albeit insufficiently. By connecting the body, language, and knowledge in this entangled way, Bataille perhaps suggests that we move towards creating a ‘chiasmic’ language, one that transcends the separation between mind and body that has been so ingrained in us. As Mark Taylor, writing of the Bataillean body, describes, This chiasmic body cannot be articulated in terms of the binary opposites that structure thought and language. Never ‘proper, clean, neat, or tidy,’ the body is inescapably transgressive. Such an improper body is the corps étranger. With no firmly fixed limits, it is never clear precisely where the body begins or ends. Concave and convex intersect to form a knot that cannot be untied. (Taylor 126) The thread of “The Solar Anus,” by insistently attempting to connect the heterogenous, asks itself to be liberated from its own logocentric framework, towards a chiasmic language. Chiasmic language, chiasmic bodies: transgressive, unlimited, and expansive, the body and Chang-Park !10 language entangle with one another, allowing the excremental to speak, without denaturing the wild energy of the heterogenous. How might this chiasmus be formed? III. Transgression of the Myth: The Minotaur The chiasmic body might be found by following the thread further, into the primordial Cretan myth of the labyrinth. Bataille’s thread, it must be stressed, is the thread of Ariadne: “Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.” What is it that lies inside the labyrinth of thought? It is the Solar Anus — or more precisely, Bataille’s parodically equivalent Jesuve. In attempting to write of this impossible concatenation between high and low, Bataille approaches the limits of language, copulating the two most heterogenous, oppositional forms, even identifying himself with this monstrous copula to the point of a heightened erotic, sacrifical frenzy. It is in one sense, a Hegelian synthesis to the extreme. It is in another sense, a transgressive, chiasmic body. As Bataille continues along the relatively placid rotational and vertical movements of his constructed universe, he reaches a breaking point when he arrives at the sun. In a final attempt to remain inside the system of parodic equivalence, Bataille admits, “Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.” (SA 8). And it is following this that Bataille breaks his distant, God’s-eye-view of the world, inserting himself directly into the text: When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery. For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are expressed only by the JESUVE. (SA 8, emph. mine). Bataille, in this moment, has become erect — he has chosen to look up, vertically, at the sun.2 It is blinding, and he cannot express the extremity of his experience without using a term of his own creation — the Jesuve. A corruption of the placid, giving sun, the Jesuve is a volcanic, 2 “In practice, the scrutinized sun can be identified with a mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epileptic crisis.” (“Rotten Sun” 57) Chang-Park !11 terrestrial anus.3 Though Bataille never explicates the word’s meaning directly, it can clearly be read as a portmanteau of “Jésus” and the volcano “Vésuve,” or perhaps of “Je suis” (I am), “Je suivre” (I follow), “dessous” (above), and “dessus” (below) (Krell 155). It is the copula taken to its limit in the form of a single word, encompassing the sun and the volcano (a terrestrial anus), the high and the low. Bataille even copula-tes himself with the Jesuve, stating “I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun,” and in this way merges not only the high with the low, but himself with the other (SA 9). In Bataille’s merging of his own subjectivity with that of the Jesuve, there exists a deep resonance with the myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur. The Cretan myth begins with the sexual passion that Queen Pasiphaë experiences for a bull. From their coitus the Minotaur is borne. Half-animal, half-man, it is a monstrous, shameful embodiment of sexual perversion. Like the Solar Anus, it embodies a frenzied synthesis between the animal and the human, the low and the high. Only reachable through the traversal of Daedalus’ labyrinth which encloses it, the Minotaur deals death, eating the Athenian youths who are sent into the labyrinth each year to feed the beast. It is only after Theseus is sent to Crete that this submission to the monster is reversed — with the help of Ariadne, Theseus successfully kills the Minotaur and uses her ball of thread to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth. He escapes death, escapes the labyrinth, and is henceforth celebrated for having liberated the city from its ritualistic, death-dealing past (Doob 12). Unlike Theseus who destroys the monstrous body and escapes unscathed, still fully human, Bataille identifies with the Minotaur itself, writing, “I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.” (SA 9). The mythic copulation between Pasiphaë and the bull is one that was a central image not only to Bataille but to other Surrealists and his close collaborators, including the artist André Masson, who created numerous depictions of Pasiphaë and the bull. In “The Cry” the volcano appears in the background; the explosive, terrestrial force of the Jesuve perhaps engenders the violent copulation of Pasiphaë and the bull (Fig 1). While Masson often depicts a Pasiphaë being violently raped or dominated by the bull, it seems that Bataille’s relationship to the Minotaur is one that resembles more closely a mutual sacrifice. In writing that he “want[s] to have his throat slashed” while violating the girl, and in stating “I am the Jesuve,” Bataille identifies himself with 3 “The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus” (SA 8) Chang-Park !12 the monstrous Minotaur which is to be killed, which parallels the scandalous terror of the Jesuve. Further, Bataille writes in a later text, “Rotten Sun,” of solar ecstasy representing both the sacrifice of the bull, and of the human: “Of course the bull himself is also an image of the sun, but only with his throat slit. […] One might add that the sun has also been mythologically expressed by a man slashing his own throat, as well as by an anthropomorphic being deprived of a head.” (“Rotten Sun” 57). So while it is true that Bataille engages in a certain masculinist binary in the text — coding himself as the masculine, solar violator of the dark anus and la nuit, the binary becomes frustrated through Bataille’s breakage of the boundaries between self and other through mutual Fig. 1. André Masson. The Cry. 1937. Paris, private collection. Printed in “Masson’s Pasiphaë: Eros and the Unity of the Cosmos”. Doris A. Birmingham, 1987. Plate 11. Print. sacrifice. Thus the figure of the minotaur mythically functions as the culminating destruction of the Hegelian synthesis which Bataille suggests in the title of “The Solar Anus” but never fully produces. In working off of Hegelian dialectical ground, Bataille proceeds via a parodic and systematic thread into its own inevitable entanglement, arriving at its ecstatic breaking point. He allows himself and the monstrous, chiasmic body of the Minotaur to merge and expand upon the binary structures which birthed them. By falling away from the distanced objectivity of the philosopher into his own wild, inner experience, Bataille performs the ultimate transgression of logocentric philosophical thought. Abandoning all bracketing, all distance between the subject and object, Bataille performs the mutual erotic death of himself and the Minotaur, naming this ineffable experience through the equally ineffable idea of the Solar Anus. Bataille has thus accomplished, in his traversal of the labyrinth, “the non-dialectical language of the limit which only arises in transgressing the one who speaks” (Foucault 44). Chang-Park !13 IV. Myth Interrupted By traversing the labyrinth and discovering the ways in which Bataille uses it as a ground for transgression, it has become clear that the myth itself is something which Bataille he transgresses. By choosing not to align himself with Theseus and instead engaging in his own special sacrificial relation with the Minotaur and with the bull, Bataille takes the myth out of its ancient time into the present, into his singular voice and vision. He creates not a mythology, but a literature of his own. For myth cannot be created by an individual, myth exists and functions as a narrative without author, and as a formation of a community.4 As Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Inoperative Community, the mythic will is a totalitarian one in the sense of its immanence, and myth thus engenders homogenous community. 5 Myth coheres in its totality, while Bataille pokes holes in the myth. Rather than using mythology against philosophy as it might initially seem, Bataille writes in a totally different vein — in the form of literature that is an interruption of myth. To borrow Nancy’s term: “Myth is interrupted by literature precisely to the extent that literature does not come to an end” (Nancy 64). Literature constantly rewrites itself, rewrites its founding myths, breaking the totalizing truth and immanence of the uninterrupted myth. In considering the body of Bataille’s work as a whole, it is instructive how he continually writes and rewrites the same topics — one might trace a thread between “The Solar Anus” and his erotic novella “The Story of the Eye,” to his various other short texts including “The Jesuve” and “The Pineal Eye.” All of Bataille’s works are interconnected in some way, yet all are heterogenous, conflicting and struggling against each other as well as they cohere. Thus Bataille’s writing process forms a greater labyrinth, perhaps the labyrinth of his very being. But it is not enough to focus on Bataille the individual, Bataille the writer. For as abstruse and esoteric as he may seem, his act of writing engenders a form of sharing — not the crystallization of a complete and totalizing community, but a raw communication which allows all beings to exist in a space of non-identity. Writing exists at the limit, “Not the limit of communication, but the limit upon which communication takes place.” (Nancy 67). The 4 “The very idea of inventing a myth, in this sense, is a contradiction in terms. Neither the community nor, consequently, the individual (the poet, the priest, or one of their listeners) invents the myth: to the contrary, it is they who are invented or who invent themselves in the myth.” (Nancy 59) 5 “Essentially, myth’s will to power was totalitarian. It may perhaps even define totalitarianism (or what I have called immanentism), which is therefore strictly speaking also interrupted.” (Nancy 56) Chang-Park !14 heterogeneity of individual beings is brought into a common space through writing, wherein beings remain unassimilable and unassimilated, but nevertheless are able to co-exist: What is shared on this extreme and difficult limit is not communion, not the completed identity of all in one, nor any kind of completed identity. What is shared therefore is not the annulment of sharing, but sharing itself, and consequently everyone’s nonidentity, each one’s nonidentity to himself and to others, and the nonidentity of the work to itself, and finally the nonidentity of literature to literature itself.” (Nancy 66). Literature, and the literary transgression which Bataille enacts, is then the exploration of a community that remains heterogenous while exposing commonalities between beings. Foucault’s vision for an anti-Hegelian transgressive form of thought is embodied neither through mythos nor the logos which negates it, but through a practice of writing which interrupts this binary. Transgression lies not at the limit between a given and its negation, but in the exploration of the difference which keeps effusive, excremental, chiasmic bodies from being assimilable into a single, immanent tradition. And it is in exploring this transgressive nature of writing that we may introduce the space for the fertile being-in-common that results from our difference. Chang-Park !15 Works Cited Bataille, Georges. "The Jesuve." Visions of Excess. Tran. Allan Stoekl. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 73. Print. ---. "The Labyrinth." Visions of Excess. Tran. Allan Stoekl. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 171. Print. ---. "The Pineal Eye." Visions of Excess. Tran. Allan Stoekl. Ed. Allan Stoekl. 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