the logic of the lost moment

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The Logic of the Lost Moment

Prolegomena to a Logic of the Lost Moment

Georges Bataille writes of a certain moment perduin Histoire de ratsand Dianus,which, with L'Orestie,

comprise both La Haine de la Posieand its retitled but little altered second edition, L'impossible. This lost

moment, of which Bataille writes in the voice of his erstwhile pseudonym, Dianus1, is of cardinal

importance to any understanding of this book and of Bataille's thought. It will be necessary to draw

theoretical connections between Bataille's text, certain essays by Freud, and Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety,

and to additionally refer at points to Proust and his parallel and contrasting conceptions of les temps perdu

and les temps retrouv. Furthermore, we must view the moment perduin the context of the associated moment du

retourand moment suspendu. The loss and pursuit of the moment perduconstitute an essential condition of

living. However, as a moment which one is compelled and condemned to seek out and repeat, this would

also embody the work of the Freudian death-drive: one might say that it is necessary to allow the death-

drive to operate so that one may live. Furthermore, the logic of the lost moment is paradoxical on another

level, for Bataille writes:

la vrit nous atteignons; nous atteignons soudain le point qu'il faillait et nous passons le restede nos jours chercher un moment perdu; mais que de fois nous le manquons, pour cetteraison prcisment que le chercher nous en dtourne, nous unir est sans doute un moyen... demanquer jamais le moment du retour...2

That is, one can only attain or return to the lost moment on condition that one relinquishes the attempt to

grasp and fix it, to retain it; the moment of return, if attained, is only attained on condition that it be

immediately lost again. One is thus condemned to repetition and to loss, as the moment eludes any attempt

to grasp it.

In a note to the previously cited passage in the 2004 Pleiadeedition of Bataille's collected fiction,

Gilles Ernst highlights the significance of the expression lost moment in the broader context of Bataille's

work, writing that l'expression dsigne l'exprience du temps propre tous les hros de Bataille: par

1 Bataille publishedL'Amitiin 1940 under this name;Le Coupable, published in 1944, is introduced by a few lines signed by Bataillewhich read Un nomm Dianus ecrivit ces notes et mourut. (pg. 9) while an earlier abandoned title had beenL 'Amiti: Notes de Dianus.(Lettre Raymond Queneau, in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres(Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 191-2). Finally, in the same year (1947)thatHistoire de rats(subtitledJournal de Dianus),Dianus, andLa Haine de la Posiewere published, Bataille also published L'Alleluia:

Catechisme de Dianus. InHistoireandDianus, Dianus now appears as an embodied actor/narrator.2 Georges Bataille,L'Impossible(Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1962), pg. 31.

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bonheur accessible). 6

Without neurosis, thus, one is left (like most) in a state of despair. There is no possibility of access to the

present in the strong sense, for this is the time of most intense life of the affirmation of life unto the

point of death, as Bataille would later formulate it the present is reduced to a moment of limited action

bound by future possibilities. There is no room left in such despair7 for those moments in which the sense

of such living is given to experience:

Ces moments d'ivresse o nous bravons tout, o l'ancre leve, nous allons gament versl'abme, sans plus de souci de l'invitable chute que des limites donnes dans l'origine, sont lesseuls o nous sommes tout fait dlivrs du sol (des lois)...

Rien n'existe qui n'ait ce sens insens commun aux flammes, aux rves, aux fous-rires en cesmoments o la consumation se prcipite, au-del du dsir du durer. Mme le dernier non-sens

la limite est toujours ce sens fait de la ngation de tous les autres.8

This sens insensis common also to the lost moment and to that moment in which the lost moment is

suddenly attained for in order to attain the moment, to reach the present for but a moment, one must

venture au-del du dsir du durer, and relinquish the desire to fix and grasp the moment.

Proust, Freud and the Histoire de rats

The title Histoire de ratsrefers directly to a story told by Dianus in the second part of the rcitii, a

story about one X. who has been dead for some twenty years. Again, the notes to the Pleiadeedition are

instructive, and all the more so in this case for there we read that:

Dans le titre, d'abord, o ratsne renvoie sans doute pas uniquement l'histoire du rituelpervers de Proust faisant piquer des rats. Les rats, si songe L'homme aux ratsde Freud,pourraient tre aussi les animaux lis au pre.9

It is evident that X. in the story is indeed Proust, for Bataille writes of him that il est, mort depuis vingt

ans, le seul crivain de nos jours qui rva d'galer les richesses desMille et une Nuits,10 for, in L'exprience

intrieure, he writes Je lui donnerai [la posie] un horizon plus vaste, et plus vague : celui des modernesMille

et une nuitsque sont les livres de Marcel Proust.11 It is thus evident that we must consider Bataille's le

6 L'impossible, pg. 31-2.7 We must here understand despair in a Kierkegaardian sense as the sickness unto death. It is known that Bataille readThe Concept

of Anxietyin French translation around the time at which this was written; indeed, Bataille had thought to publishLe Mort, writtenduring the same period, under the pseudonym Vigilius Parisiensis.Oeuvres Completes, Tome IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pg. 363.

8 L'Impossible, pg. 26.9 Gilles Ernst, L'impossible: Notice, inRomans et rcits, pg. 1219-20.

10 L'impossible, pg. 44.11 Georges Bataille, L'exprience intrieure,inOeuvres Compltes, Tome V, pg. 158.

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moment perdu in contrast to les temps perdu in Proust. Moreover, it would be appropriate to here draw

upon Freud to extend the analysis, for in addition to the indication given by the necessity of repeating the

lost moment (i.e. an indication which recalls Freud's discussions of the compulsion to repeat and the death-

drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principleiii), the rats which X. pierces, pins down, are symboles les plus puissants

[...] ...symbolisent les parents dfunts de Proust,12 that is, at once Oedipal symbols and at the same time

symbols of past times. It is further a quintessentially ritualistic and repetitive act, which again recalls the

aforementioned text by Freud. It is imperative to fully understand this episode in order to give an

understanding to the symbolic significance of the rat's tail, which recurs throughout the subsequent pages

ofHistoireand is the final image evoked before its end; it is equally necessary to have recourse to Freud in

order to elucidate this, the meaning of the story the story and Bataille's critical relation to Proust.

In Proust, it would seem that there is indeed a search for a moment which has been lost.

The first return of this moment is put on display in the emergence of involuntary memory in the famous

madeleine episode of the first book ofA la recherche du temps perdu. It is, however, Les Temps Retrouv, the final

book in which Proust's narrator succeeds in recapturing les temps perdu in his vocation as a writer,which

Bataille found most interesting and had discussed at length in L'exprience intrieureand Sur Nietzsche. In

Proust, that which is lost is, in the end, regained and fixed in the present which, according to Bataille

would constitute not merely an illusion, but rather the decisive and final lossof the moment. This is evident

in a passage which follows on the heels of Dianus' telling of the story of rats:

Le pire est sans doute une dure relative, donnant l'illusion qu'on saisit, qu'on saisira du moins.Ce qui reste dans les mains est la femme et, de deux choses l'une, ou elle nous chappe ou lachute dans le vide qu'est l'amour nous chappe : nous nous rassurons dans ce dernier cas maiscomme des dupes. Et le mieux qui nous puisse arriver, c'est d'avoir chercher le momentperdu13

If thus the best that can happen is to be in pursuit of the lost moment, it is indisputable that it is necessary

to relinquish the Proustian attempt to satisfyivthe desire to recapture, fix and make enduring this moment.

This is, in Bataille's account, merely an illusion of that which is worst the relative endurance of the

moment in which the lost returns worst because it induces one to abandon the search, to decisively turn

away from the lost moment and into despair.

12 Romans et rcits, pg. 1236 n 21.13 L'impossible, pg. 45-6.

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the present. Therefore, we should first take into view the relevant passage from L'impossible:

La nudit de B. met en jeu mon attente, quand celle-ci a seule le pouvoir de mettre en question cequi est(l'attente m'arrache au connu, car le moment perdul'est jamais; sous le couvert du dj vu,j'en cherche prement l'au-del : l'inconnu).17

In the nudity of B. (the lover of both Dianus and of A.), Dianus' expectation is in play, which calls into

question that which is that is, calls into question that which is known and subject to the operations of lucid,

instrumental reason. The lost moment is lost lost forever and yet it is the object after which Dianus

searches, knowing full well that any retrieval or return would differ at least infinitesimally, that difference

which marks djvuas different from any original moment of which it may be a repetition, but this

difference, beyond the lost moment, beyond the experience of dj vu, is precisely the unknown.

This is to say that the moment in which the lost moment returns is uncannyin the precise sense, as

Freud writes in his essay:

The factor of the repetition of the same thing ... does undoubtedly, subject to certainconditions and combined with certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which,furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-states.18

Is not repetition that which Dianus seeks, in seeking his lost moment that moment which he remembers

as the time of M.'sviii death? It is indeed the absolute unknown that irrupted in the moment, and which the

moment of return would unleash:

Il y avait, dans la chambre de la morte, un silence de pierre, reculant les limites des sanglots,comme si, les sanglots n'ayant plus de fin, le monde en entier dchir laissait, par la dchirure,deviner la terreur infinie.19

Further, this moment of the irruption of the unknown into knowledge is unheimlichin the sense of the

simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar combined in a single moment. The unknown irrupting into

knowledge, into writing, would be precisely such a moment. The experience recounted in the foregoing

citation was precisely of this nature, and in returning to this moment, Dianus finds for a fleeting moment

that sens insensof living:

Je ne voulais plus rien sinon savoir... le froid qui me coupait des lvres tait come la rage de lamort : c'tait de l'aspirer de levouloir, qui transfigurait ces pnibles instants. Je retrouvais dansl'air, autour de moi, cette ralit ternelle, insense, que je n'avais connu qu'une fois, dans lachambre d'une morte : une sorte de saut suspendu.20

17 L'impossible, pg. 48-9.18 The Uncanny, pp. 236-7.

19 L'impossible, pg. 78.20 L'impossible, pg 78.

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That moment, a moment in which one escapes neurosis by finding a way to the present, flees like a rat, like

the moment which was lost. This moment, too, is subject to the same law of repetition like the lost

moment, en cet instant suspendu... je ne doute pas cependant que si je ne l'aimais comme je fais, je n'aurais

pu connatre mon tat.21 Knowledge slips through the fingers of Dianus. The preceding metaphors were

not chosen by chance or whim, but rather because it appears that the tail of the rat signifies, in Histoire, the

transitory nature of the moment. Moreover, beyond indicating a particular characteristic of the lost

moment as such, Bataille draws this figure into connection with the lost moment so dear to Dianus, the

time which he spent with M. while she was alive and the moments following her death. The following lines

give us a nearly complete understanding of this figure:

... si maintenant je pense en ce moment le plus lointain d'une dfaillance, d'un dgotphysique et moral la queue rose d'un rat dans la neige. Il me semble entrer dans l'intimitdece qui est, un lger malaise me crispe le coeur. Et certainement je sais de l'intimit de M., quiest morte, qu'elle tait comme la queue d'un rat, belle comme la queue d'un rat!Je le savais dj quel'intimit des choses est la mort.22

The tail of the rat does indeed signify intimacy with that which is, but it equally signifies intimacy with death

and the slippage from the known into the absolutely unknown. That is the queue d'un ratsignifies the

suspended return of the lost moment. Furthermore, as though more evidence were necessary, the entire

narrative concludes with the line (...les plus tendres baisers ont un arrire-got de rat.)23That cold

moment after the leap, when non-ground gives way to ground, has the aftertaste of rat.

Of Return, Repetition and Farce

The episode mentioned previously occurs immediately prior to the end of the second

section of Histoire de rats. Dianus collapses in the snow and is by chance discovered almost immediately by B.

and A. returning to town to retrieve him. They take him to convalesce in the castle which he had sought in

his impossible search for B. He awakes in le coeur du chteau24 - he has attained the lost moment. Having

attained his lost moment, one whose experience is suffused in memories of M. and her death, Dianus is left

21 L'Impossible, pg. 64-5.22 L'Impossible, pg. 68.

23 L'impossible, pg. 100.24 L'impossible, pg. 92.

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in a room adjoining the state room in which B.'s dead father lay. The moment has indeed returned, he has

reached the impossible destination of the chteauand has been reunited with B., and yet, how could such a

repetition not be seen as farcical? The chteau, reunion with B. and the attainment of the moment of return

are no longer impossibilities rather, Dianus is there beyond all limits, suspended after a leap with no

ground upon which to fall. ...Nous unir est sans doute un moyen... de manquer jamais le moment du

retour.25Why then is it, at the moment of reunion, that the moment of return is held in suspense and

exposed as a mere farce, a simulacrum? It is so in the first instance because the compulsion to repeat le

moment perduis governed by an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things

which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces,26 and

the state which has been achieved differs materially from that of which it is a repetition. Like the young

child, no pleasure arises out of this modified repetition. Moreover, joining together, which obviously is a

term used euphemistically, is unique in Freud's discussion in that it runs counter to, or at least temporarily

obstructs, the work of the death-drive which is also the work of the compulsion to repeat.

Thus, while the perpetual quest in search of le moment perduis a fundamental condition of

life and access to the boundless freedom of the present moment, it is also at the same time true that this

search has as its goal:

...an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or otherdeparted and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths... ...[taking] ever morecomplicated dtoursbefore reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfullykept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of thephenomena of life.27

That is, it must not go without noting that we have here in superposition the fundamental condition of

(non-neurotic or non-despairing) life and the very real instinctual drive which has death and the past as its

goal. To some degree, perhaps, it is due to its imbrication with the death-drive that the search must have an

object, a moment, from the past as its aim.

The moment of return is thus never that which is sought. The following passage from

Beyond the Pleasure Principlearticulates virtually verbatim the dilemma in which Dianus is caught at le coeur du

25 L'impossible, pg. 31.26 Sigmund Freud,Beyond the Pleasure Principle, inThe Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Volum XVIII, Translated by James

Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), pg. 36.27 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 38-9

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chteau:

What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards furtherperfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is basedall that is most precious in human civilization. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive forcomplete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience ofsatisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to removethe repressed instincts persisting tension; and it is the difference in amount between thepleasure of satisfaction which is demandedand that which is actually achieved that provides thedriving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poets words,ungebndigt immer vorwrts dringt. The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as arule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative butto advance in the direction in which growth is still free - though with no prospect of bringingthe process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal.28

Disappointing thus, this moment of return could perhaps best be described by the words of

Monsignor Alpha in Dianus, which takes place the day following the not entirely explained suicide of D.

(which took place in the unspecified duration that elapses between the two narratives), when Bataille thus

writes in the voice of Alpha of a: moment de complicit et d'intimit, les mains dans les mains de la mort.

Moment de lgret au bord de l'abme. Moment sans espoir et sans ouverture.29While this is the return of

the lost moment, by returning the moment changes irrevocably, the infinitesimal difference between an

original experience and the experience of dj vufreezes the returning lost moment mid-leap into the

present; it can now be seen in its truth, as Dianus writes A ce moment suspendu... je pensais : je trichais

dans la neige hier, ce n'tait pas le saut que j'ai cru.30 The impossible and the moment of return had thus

been attained by a mere ruse, a self-deception, and became in turn possible and real.

Despair and The Logic of the Lost Moment

We have thus seen a fundamental paradox essential to the logic of the moment perdu: it and

the compulsion to seek its repetition are both essential to livingin the robust sense, while at the same time

the compulsive search manifests the work of the death-drive. A further paradoxical tension is established

between the moment perduand dsespoir, the state which results from lacking a moment or having turned away

from the search. Put crudely, one is suspended between eternal melancholia and a state of despair. This

latter tension bears further discussion, and is introduced in the following passsage:

Au cours de la conversation... J'avais la tentation de parler : ma tentation rpondait un visagerailleur (A. ne rit, ne sourit que rarement, il n'est pas en lui de moment perdu la recherche duquel

28 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pg. 42.

29 L'impossible, pg. 120.30 L'impossible,pg. 98.

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il serait condamn il est dsespr(comme la plupart) d'ordinaire il subsiste un arrire-pense debonheur accessible).31

If it is true then that having a moment perdu, the repetition and return of which one is condemned to

search out as a condition of living in the vertiginous proximity to the impossible, death and the unknown,

then what must we make of its dialectical opposite, the dsespoirof A. who lacks such a moment? From the

standpoint of etymology, dsespoirwould amount to meaning to be cut off from hope, that is to say, cut

off from the future, or rather, the present; nevertheless, in either case, dsespoirwould signify the past in the

guise of knowledge placing limits upon present and future possibilities. Moreover, knowing that at this point

in his trajectory, Bataille had become deeply influenced by Kierkegaardix one is led to introduce, by way of

The Sickness Unto Deaththe Germanic etymology of despair as being split into twox - one is thus doubly cut,

cut off from access to the present, as in neurosis, but also at the same time divided again from oneself (and

it is in this light that we may read Dianus and Father A. as doubles of one another).32 It is precisely the

lucidity, seriousness and clear rationality of A. that results in such despair. Furthermore, as Anti-Climacus

repeats, despair is the sickness unto death, we are once againface--facewith the paradoxical relationship of

the quest which refuses despair and yet performs the work of the death-drive.

Within le coeur du chteauwe witness the febrile reflections of Dianus on the topic of the lucid,

despairing reflectivity of A., first observing:

A l'ide qu'il donne de lui, je mesure mal la misre d A. J'imagine une rflexion calme, insrantdans l'univers son ennuyeuse limpidit. Ar ces lents travaux de l'action et de la rflexion sesuccdant, par ce jeu d'audaces qui ne sont, dans le fond, qu'autant de prudences lucides, quepeut-il atteindre?33

What indeed can A. attain? At least from the perspective of Dianus and the lost moment? He can attain no

more than material consequences, Dianus continues, for Nul d'entre nous n'est davantage un d, tirant du

hasard, du fond d'un abme, quelque drision nouvelle.34By contrast to the unlimited impossibilities given

by chance, A. is subject to the limits of possibility given by the past he is despairing insofar as he is unable

to forge a new path to the present moment and can only act in view of a future possibility. This, moreover,

31 L'impossible, pg. 31-2.32 Concerning this phenomenon of doubling, particularly that of the narrator, Dianus, and le P re A., see the visual appendix and

endnote xii.

33 L'impossible, pg. 92-3.34 L'impossible,pg. 93.

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passes for intelligence and wisdom, in the specifically Hegelian sense, for:

L'intelligence la plus grand est au fond la mieux dupe: penser qu'on apprhende la vritquand on ne fait que fuir, et vainement, l'vidente sottise de tous. Et personne n'a vraiment ceque chacun pense: quelque chose de plus. Purile croyance leur talisman des plus rigoreux.35

Like Proust, A. seeks to grasp, to conceptualize and to speak, while Dianus, in opposition can only write in

an attempt to indicate that passage into the unknown that lies dormant within the world of words.

Finally, the passage with which this section commences is without a doubt linked to a particular

episode in L'orestie, entitled Le Toit du Temple, which in Bataille's manuscripts was substantially enlarged

and placed a greater emphasis on the temptation to which the episode alludes.xi Moreover, the phrase la

tentation de parler or la tentation parler recurs several times throughout Histoireand Dianus we must

ask, what is this temptation, and to what does it tempt?

What can be said at the outset is that speech, considered as banal communication through the use of

mutually intelligible language represents a reduction of that which is said to the order of known things and

knowledge which limits possibility. On the other hand, writing, particularly of the poetic type which Bataille

does place in a position of privilege rather constitutes an opening unto the unknown, the impossible, and

thus the authentic present, within the false transcendence (or, alternatively false immanence) of language.

When thus faced with this temptation to speak, one's sole proper response would be to say, with Dianus, je

sais que je devrais me taire: je recule, en parlant, le moment de l'irrmdiable.36

Epilogue: la mort de Dianus

The following epigraph is found immediately preceding the first section of Le Coupable, another

book attributed to Dianus. Tellingly, the epigraph, in the manuscript, bears the latest date found within,

October 1943, and is, in fact, two strophes drawn from Bataille's epic poem of the same year,

L'Archanglique. In light of the foregoing, and knowing from the preface that Dianus is by this time dead, we

may well reasonably read these lines, and the poem as a whole, as the swan song, or suicide poem of

Dianus:

...dans un bol de ginune nuit de fteles toiles tombent du ciel

35 L'impossible, pg. 94.36 L'impossible, pg. 49-50.

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je lampe la foudre longs traitsje vais rire aux clatsla foudre dans le coeur37

Le coeur du chteau, now a possible place like any other, with B. available as any other woman, Dianus has no

longer anyraison d'tre he has permitted the death-drive to operate by pursuing the repetition of a lost

moment which he discovers, in its return, to be a void, another loss. This time, it is the loss of time itself,

no longer knowing what to do, or for what reason to act. This presents a situation of total disarray, for as

Bataille writes also in the voice of Dianus:

Chaque tre est insr dans l'ordonnance de l'universe, chacun emploie le temps comme ilconvient. Moi pas, mon temps est d'habitude bant, en moi bant comme une bleassure.

Tantt ne sachant que faire et tantt me prcipitant, ne sachant o commence, o finit mabesogne, m'agitant fbrile et dsordre, demi-distrait. Pourtant, je sais m'y prendre... Mais

l'angoisse est latente et s'coule en forme de fivre, d'impatience, d'avarice (peur imbcile deperdremon temps).38

Now, not only is moment, but time itself is lost and disordered and yet, his time open as a wound, he

knows better than to fear the loss or waste of his time. This loss or waste is necessary to continue with life.

However, at the end of Le Coupable, this wound in time unexpectedly closes, it closes for

lack of caring any longer whether the moment or time is wasted, but for caring only to carry himself

beyond all limits given in advance. It is thus that Dianus mustcommit suicide, for he must either do so or

succumb to despair, insofar as he now knows precisely what to do and is now active. It is thus that after the

last notes of Le Coupable(apparently dated months after the presumable date at which Histoireends) that

Dianus comes to will and enact his own downfall, for the final note of Le Coupablereads:

Un dsir hagard (celui de m'exprimer jusqu'au bout) la fin je m'en soucie comme d'unepomme. Ce qu'on aime arrive comme on ternu. Mon absence de souci s'exprime en volont.

J'ai vu que je devraisfairececi ou cela : je le fais (mon temps n'est plus bant). 194339

Here, at the end of the story of Dianus, we can see clearly the opposition between him and Proust's

narrator there is a return of that lost moment, but rather no full recuperation of time, as in the latter case.

For the difference is spoken most clearly by citing the very words with which Proust concludes Les Temps

Retrouv:

Du moins, si elle m'etait laisse assez longtemps pour accomplir mon oeuvre, ne manquerais-jepas d'abord d'y dcrire les hommes... comme occupant une place si considrable, ct de celle

37 Georges Bataille,Le Coupable(Paris: Gallimard, 1944), pg. 13.

38 Le Coupable, pg. 14639 Le Coupable, pg. 176.

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si restreinte qui leur est rserve dans l'espace, une place au contraire prolonge sans mesure...dans le Temps.40

40 Marcel Proust,A la recherche du temps perdu: Vol. V II: Les Temps Retrov(Paris: Gallimard, 1954), pg. 443.

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Visual Appendix

(Illustrations from Histoire de ratsby Alberto Giacometti)xii

(Cover of Histoire de ratsas it appeared prior to incorporation into La Haine de la Posie)

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Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia,in The Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud: Volume XIV, Translated by James Strachey, in collaboration with

Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955).

The Uncanny, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud: Volume XVII, Translated by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud (London:

The Hogarth Press, 1955).

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud: Volume XVIII, Translated by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud(London: The Hogarth Press, 1955).

Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, Translated by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

The Sickness Unto Death, Translated and Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Le concept de l'angoisse,Trad. Knud Ferlov & Jean-J. Gateau (Paris: Gallimard, 1935).Marcel Proust,A la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. VII: Le Temps Retrouv(Paris: Gallimard, 1954).

Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: La Mort A L'Oeuvre(Paris: Librarie Sguier, 1987)

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i A particular terminological difficulty is presented by Bataille's use of both le moment and l'instant in constructing variousexpressions. In the French translations Nietzsche which Bataille is known to have read, the German Augenblick is translated by

l'instant, as is Kierkegaard's Danish for moment. As there is no obvious conceptual difference involved in Bataille, and the words

appear to be used interchangeably, they will be understood as having at most an insignificant difference.ii InGeorges Bataille: Analyse du rcit de mort, Gilles Ernst notes Rappelons que dans le texte... se chevauchent deux grandes subdivisions :

l'une, fond e sur la num rotation romaine, le partage en trois parties, et l'autre, port e en italique sous les chiffres romains, le divise en deuxCarnetstranscendant la premi re partition. Cette double distribution apparait aussi dans [le manuscrit d'Austin], o la num rotation romain coiffe de plus des sous-titres : Rose[biff : la fille de Rose],Rat[biff : la fille de Rat], etCur.Rose Rat Cur :onregrettera la suppression de ces titres dont au moins deux,RatetCur, convenaient parfaitement au contenu de leur partie, cause de l'crivaine aux rats voqu en partie II , et parce que la partie III relate l'arrive de Dianus au c ur du chteau (Gilles Ernst,GeorgesBataille: Analyse du rcit du mort(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), pg. 224). That is, the second, central division ofHistoirede ratswas, in manuscript form, to foreground even further this story, which, it is also worth noting is a double story.

iii Between the records of books borrowed by Bataille from the Bibiloth que Nationale, included in Tome XII of his Oeuvres Compltes(pp. 551-621) and his scattered direct citations of Freud, it is known that he readBeyond the Pleasure Principle,andTotem and TabooinFrench translation, and also Mourning and Melancholia in the original German.

iv It bears noting, although it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss its ramifications, that Bataille's use here of the

verb saisir can only be read as alluding to the satisfaction of desire by means of action in Hegel.v Although it appears intuitive that Bataille's lost moment is tied to the Freudian lost object, intuition is insufficient to justify this

equivalence. The equivalence is, however, valid, on the basis of the fact that in notes and schemata written in preparation forSurNietzsche, Bataille makes use of the specific term object perdu, which he characterizes as the object dtruit' which devient positif. (Oeuvres Compltes, Tome V I, pg. 460.

vi While The Uncanny is absent from the writings of Freud known to have been read by Bataille, as noted above, it is hardly

improbably that he had read the essay. BothTotem and TabooandBeyond the Pleasure Principleare intimately related to the discussions in

The Uncanny, and are known to have been read by Bataille, and he is known to have read the journal in which the essay was firstpublished, although no record exists of his having read that particular number.

vii It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss in any depth the play of doubles and doppelgangers inStory of ratsandDianus, however,it bears note that one could readily consider either Dianus and A. to be doubles, or A. and B. as doubles. Moreover, the structural

elements of theStorysuggest such doublings, for the story is divided twice, first by sections marked by roman numerals, and secondby the division of the story into two notebooks.

viii M. = Laurix In the records reprinted inOC XI I, we see that Bataille had checked outLe Concept d'angoisseon numerous occasions, as well asIn Vino

VeritasandCrainte et Tremblement(upon the title of the last of which Bataille plays in a chapter ofLe Coupable, entitled Rire etTremblement.

x In this light, one might develop an intriguing reading ofLa Scissiparit, a piece of short fiction published by Bataille inCaheirs de laPleiadein Spring, 1949. (Reprinted inOeuvres Compltes, Tome III).

xi The relevant deleted or modified passages are reproduced here in my translation.

From Oeuvres Compltes, Tome III, pp. 529-531:

Long conversation with T. (anguish, chance, the night out of which we emerge surrounding us...) Pursued by an

intimate ultimatum : I find myself on the temple roof in flight. At my feet, the world and the temptation of

its deafness!

At the hight of my little edifice. T. beside me. We ignore the world at our feet. It is equally ignorant of the night

where we find ourselves. This night is all the more total than people, besides him and myself, would suspect.

I could not dwell upon myself, but I can thus only wager, put my life at stake.

To become what? In demi-solitude my position is itself the guarantee of a definitive solitude.

In the same temple, death, sorrow, and the inevitable reign. The indifference that we hold toward death... is that of the

infinitely heavy, surrounding sleep of the sanctified place.

Upon the roof of my ultimatum

the response that the night withholds, could I withhold it from myself?

Anguish awaiting the response of the night already knows that the night can respond only to the inexhaustible

contestation of anguish.

Aside from T. no one understands me. T. understands me: his silence assures me of the quality of my solitude. He is

like a reminder: if somehow death calls his position into question, the simple fidelity of the coffin would remind him.

In that which reaches the others, only that part which ignorant of themselves could respond to us...

Only me, inaccessible, impenetrable, and...

The feeling of a decisive struggle from which nothing now could divert me. In the certainty of combat, I vacillate.

The response, it would be would be to forget the question ?

In God I find nothing but my weakness.

I stumble on, and with such difficulty! I have but one provisional escape, an instant that stops me, in which I think

of nothing. After some time I am nothing but one madly irritated.

IN THIS FIGURATIVE PLACE OF DOUBLE SOLITUDE AND NAKEDNESS IN THE COLD

AT THE HIGHT OF WHICH, IN SPITE OF THE NIGHT, I SEE THE EXPANSE OF THE WORLD, THE


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POSSIBLITIES OF BEING

HOW CAN I EXPRESS MY FEELING?

It seems to me that I have spoken to my mirror, it was the anticipation of absence, my interlocutor had the

appearance and not the warmth of life.

Yesterday T. remained squeezed into a corner, a little light illuminated his visage (fair, pink, thin lips) and his body

(the appearance of empty clothes).It appeared to my perception, afar, like a bolt of lightning, the regions where anguish has led; a feeling introduced

by a phrase: the phrase was accompanied by an imperceptible change, a click breaking a link, the movement of

distance which had captivated T. (and myself with him?) quickly resumed.

A movement of recoil as disappointing as that of a supernatural being, of a demon, of an enchanter of children, or of

rats.

Nothing further from nor more contrary to malevolence.

In the course of the conversation T. said to me: I can speak in such a way that it would be as if nothing had been

said.

My anguish represents to me the impossibility of ever annulling my affirmations... The conversation was slow and,

as if some unacceptable oppression held us back, we sought at length for words.I would have liked, at any cost, for T. to see the implication of anguish in chance without which anguish would be

hidden from being properly placed in question (they would be taken out of play if they weren't at the mercy of

chance).

In my anguish it seems to me that T. never laughs at chance, and my powerlessness overcomes me.

My effort lost itself in the rarefied air of regions toward which despite himself T. followed me.

A noise disturbed us and T. arose and departed without delay (he left after an hour had passed).

I remain, reading, overwhelmed by a feeling of absence.

xii In the caption to the reproduction of these images inGeorges Bataille: La Mort A L'Oeuvre, Michel Surya states that the portraits of A.and D. both depict Bataille himself, while that of B. depicts his wife, Diane. Following this suggestion, it is all the more apt to read

this story in terms of The Uncanny for this would demonstrate the relationship of doubling between A. and D. (Portraits de

Georges et Diane Bataille, Michel Surya, pg. 540).

the logic of the lost moment

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