Schizogenesisby

Georges BatailleTranslated by Rowan G. Tepper, M.A.

Translation of La Scissiparié, in Oeuvres Completes III, 225-232Originally published in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, Spring 1949

I

Possessed by rage and enraged.My head? A nail, a nail newly born

I cry. No one hears me. The opacity, eternity, empty silence – mine, of course. In screaming out I suppress myself: this conviction is worthy of praise.

I will eat, d..., write, laugh, fear death, and grow pale at the idea of my nails being turned back.

II

I would like to take hold of an unyielding idea of myself, to raise my furrowed brow into the air, denying the odor of death.

I would like to forget the imperceptible slippage of myself into corruption.

I'm nauseated by the sky whose blinding sweetness has the obscenity of a “girl” going to bed.

I imagine an attractive prostitute, elegant, naked and dispirited, with her piglet-like gaity.

A festive sun flooded the room. I shaved myself clean before the mirror bordered with an ornate gilded frame. Standing up, I turned back toward the orb of the sun, but the mirror reproduced its image before my face. Who am I? I ought to have had the strength in me to trace clearly the letters of my name and today's date upon the sun-lit window: there, I should have stopped thinking and laughed at it all the more. Am I but an effect of the mirror's duplicity, the illuminated immensity, and of this too easy relation with myself ?

I ought to have a sublime idea of myself: for that, I have the necessary strength. I equate love (bodies touching indecently) to the limitlessness of being – to nausea, to the sun, and to death. Obscenity reveals a moment which flows into a delirium of sense.

It is that part within my character that is least called out (but, at last): the side gustave (or pig).

III

Letter from the author to Mme E...

Received a telegram from the Monsignor:“Success. Hurry. Difficult situation.” I gazed at myself at length in the mirror and I'm afraid to burst into laughter.The duplicity of the Monsignor irritates me to the point of losing my head. What it lets me catch a glimpse of is the foundation of things, which is decidedly falsified.

Letter from Mme E... to the author

...finally, my throat has closed up. The state into which your words have placed me is the most nerve-wracking I have known. At moments I burst into laughter. And I imagine that,from now on, the laughter of madness is endless. It stops, and at that very moment I have the distressing yet voluptuous feeling of being put in my place like a rat...

IV

Met Mme E... in Paris. We departed the next day for Rome, where we awaited Monsignor. Monsignor, or rather...

Opera. Loud music. Much liquor.

In the morning, falling, with a sharp knife in hand, I cut open my finger. Mme E... laughed loudly to see me fall, but the blood abounded and her having laughed heightened the awkwardness. I brought the discomfort to an end with a smile: I was pleasant, loose and adorable: she, sly, pale and willfully indecent.

If intelligence is feminine...

... I would want that mine would, in a resolute movement, come to resemble an impious woman.

There is a conjugation of corporeal verbs whose end is a comical song.I'll sing to the shame of the banquet table :

Ravadja la moukèreRavadja bono

and the violence of the song, in spite of me, outside of me, rebounds:

Soak your ass in a bowl of stew,You will see if it is hot or cool.

If she did not go until ravjada, this impious woman would neither have so resolutely illuminated the force of decay nor have been so resolutely beautiful: the rot and ray of the sun. But it is my way of loving Mme

E..., of laughing and, finally, of reasoning.

Alexandrette's visit at two o'clock. I tremble (the liquor from the night before?). It seemed hateful like the little fly-cages, which, as a child, I filled with disgustingly living insects. It was gone and we remained, Mme

E... and myself, in a desert of f..., within a grandiloquent movement exposed to the hostility of the stars. Within two hours we departed on the train to Rome.

Music from yesterday evening leapt into my head. To cry, to vomit gaily. Disheveled streams. Courtesy of Mme E... Bare-shouldered, well educated, but such indecency!

V

Today, when I make love, my pleasure is no longer obscured by the feeling that it will end – and that I will die without having been satisfied. It came to me like a dream, during that happy excess which burning pleasure itself annuls: I imagine a time where I would no longer possess the means to renew it. I lacked the feeling of the exuberant richness of the festival, the puerile malice and laughter which is equal to God! It is true, this power itself is declining: it is of the same nature as pain. Abandon myself to my moods? Rather, I give myself to an impossible and I come like a dying monster.

Rome, a taxi-cab, Mme E...Violent lightning of an electrical storm. Rains and moon in the white streets of comic-opera: pines, delights and indolence.

I accept life on one condition.Through sublimity, eternity, lies, to have sung at the top of my lungs, carried by a theatre-chorus.

Bought a wolf for Mme E... Thirsty for insolence, it was I who put on the parties of Monsignor.

I become intoxicated by unusual ways.That singing to the masses, except for the old and grey.Ten thousand eyes in the night are the starry sky.

The more anxious the man, the happier the man.Invoking death, he cries:– Sate your comical knives, sharpen them on the teeth holding them –

The woman partly disrobed (indecent, I have said, profoundly): her nakedness to the degree of death, death to the degree of her nakedness.

VI

Village idiot!

The sole measure of my design exists before the casings and the counterfeit (that part which I'd adopted of all to reunite in the night, saying no more of that which occupied us). That it is necessary to go far... To be a star and disgrace the heights of the skies. Listening to nothing, cries or discourse in the solitude of the sky. I call Monsignor on the phone.

And we, we arrive within an hour.Alpha, Beta (thus we distinguish the twin faces of a duplication), Mme E... and me.

Like me, Mme E..., naked in the taxi, drunk without alcohol, and laughing deafly:– But who spoke to you? Alpha? Beta?The disturbance gave her features a convulsion, both slow and voluptuous.

The prelate descended the stone staircase, came to us, our hands extended.Mme E..., impatient, said to him with a girlish laugh:– Bonjour Beta!

When Mme E... said to “Bonjour Beta” to him, what struck me (thus I feel as happy at the foot of the sunlit staircase as the panels where, like spicy little dishes, trussed and robed goddesses pay sly homage to pleasure) was the vulgarity of my friend. Bowing herself, she kissed the priest's ring, and this movement of humility, like the instant before her course laughter, called out her nature, which, left to become that of an animal, was beneath that of the village tailor. I recalled what one does not habitually see in Mme E..., aside from the girl, and, in this unreal richness, I became happier as this true poverty responded to my passions.

Without transition the moment became serious.Suddenly I knew that at the top of the staircase, in an obscene disorder, I would see the other side.

Of this palace of tragedy, which appears empty, because the threshold is no longer bloody, and out of which the dogs of Jezebel have fled, I understand that, in spite of their agreeable appearance, they remained disposed to more debauched vows. That which struck within a palace, - as though in a sudden theatrical blow, - is the hatred of men they shared. The top of the monumental staircase that Monsignor and Mme E... climbed in laughter did not attract me solely as the threshold to a dreadful kingdom. I could not prevent myself from seeing in contrast, - to Mme E...'s triumphal moment, her high waist and her too bold airs, a lady ennobled by the stone framework, - the image of a stone woman. Not that I then saw anything more than a royal entrance. I don't see my friend on the terrace, in blood, in mud, in the unworldly noise of the crowd. (The roof does not suggest a crushed body but brings about vertigo.)

Rarely, my friend's desire took me in a more bestial manner. A heat, icy in some sense, gives me satisfaction. I had the feeling of the crowd at a stoning, perspiring hatred. Which cannot wait for an instant. Mme E... rapidly crossed the threshold. Alpha opened the door after two knocks.