Abstract
In 1929, Georges Bataille wrote an open letter to André Breton elaborating the polemic over questions on the work of Marquis de Sade. However, it is interesting because there is just a few mentions of de Sade as such.
Instead, he develops his own way of thinking, against the background of which his absence (and the absence of precise object) in the text will be clarified. To this end, Bataille develops a "scientific" field, which he calls heterology.
Its object is the otherness in the most general sense, which also implies a specific kind of practice. But this otherness is problematic for several reasons.
On the one hand, it is an object of heterology, but on the other, it cannot be an object as such, because every object always has a certain identity and therefore value. Likewise, the work of the Marquis de Sade can be approached at its exchange value, that is, to make it the object of our exploration and discourse, but for the cost of losing the elements to which heterology is aiming for.
Thus, knowledge, in its internal ambivalence and contradictions, becomes the subject of Bataille's interest. After all, through the gesture that tears up this knowledge, a certain practice whose characteristic is aimlessness and thus formlessness is revealed.
The contribution will therefore focus on the widest possible definition of heterology and its place in Bataille's philosophy as such. We will also try to point out the forms of practice in which that subversive gesture finds its limitless places.
It is no coincidence that at the same time, the most essential texts have also been published, bringing Bataille closer as a political thinker. Even so, it is difficult to detect traces of political organization in his work.
Despite his criticism of Marxism, some traces of Marx's influence persist in his thinking, but most interpreters agree that closer than Marxism, Bataille had to anarchism. This is evident not only from his adoration of anarchist movements in Spain, but also from the subject of heterology.
If, however, we want to understand Bataille as an anarchist, we face a considerable difficulty. It is obvious, and Bataille explicitly argues, that there is no man without a system and at the same time its denial - the system is need and so do excess.
This leads us to a claim that inevitably ties politics and the arts together. Bataille's political orientation could be summed up in Comte de Lautréamonte's words - "Poetry must be made by all.
Not by one." We show that Bataille will oscillate between these two poles. On the one hand, the system and on the other, the excesses.
Sade on one side, poetry on the other. The system as a universality and on the contrary the individuality with its capability of sacrifice this system and so do itself.