The Oresteiapar

Georges BatailleManuscript Version (1942-5)

Reconstructed, Edited & Translated, byRowan G. Tepper, M.A.

11/23/2007Revised: 3/17/2008

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This translation is based, in part, upon earlier translations of

L'Impossible by Robert Hurley, The Impossible(City Lights, 1991),

and fragments translated by Mark Spitzer, in Divine Filth(Creation Books, 2004)

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To scratch out the transparency of the skyblind

to that which is not death

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Invocation to Chance

\

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Oresteiaskydewbagpipes of life

night of spidersof innumerable hauntingsinexorable play of tearso sun in my breast blade of a knife

rest alongside my bonesrest you are the lightningrest viperrest my heart

the rivers of death turn pink with bloodgiving the world of the living your assassin's hair

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Chance, oh lascivious divinitylaughter of lightninginvisible sun thundering in the heartablazebroken bones

chance in long white stockingschance in a lace nightdressnaked change

Desperatelynaked bonesmy heart is coldmy tongue is heavy

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Discord

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Ten hundred houses falla hundred then a thousand deadat the window of the nude

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Belly openhead removedreflection of elongated cloudsimage of the immense sky

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Higherin the dark heights of the sky

higher in a mad opening

a trail of lightis the halo of death

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The areole of my deathfreedomunspeakablehopelessness of my death

I am hungry for bloodhungry for bloody earthhungry for fish hungry for ragehungry for filth hungry for cold

I am consumed by my lovea thousand candles in my moutha thousand stars in the head

My arm is lost in the shadowmy heart falls in the groundmouth to the mouth of the great void

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Me

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Heart greedy for lightbelly sparing of caressesthe sun false eyes falsewords purveyors of plague

the earth loves cold bodies

Tears of frostambiguity of eyelashes

dead woman's lipsinexpiable teeth

absence of life

nudity of death

star of frost

heartless justice

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19-11-42.I

A special kind of slow death; each thought like an abuse of power, a poisoned lie. How to disconnect myself? Imagine myself drunk? A drunkard? But alas, that's false! What words can only touch upon: I get where I am by noticing nothing. A blunder, I slipped, I fell: I didn't know it. But there's blood on the pavement, it's sticky, and my eyes, my poor eyes? That's the way it is, and it's better that way.

Dying? Dying! Ten years, ten thousand years dying.

I thought I was a man. I lived among men, as one of them (in parentheses, a pack of tigers, killing women, lighting fires, expounding without pity, they smell soot, scare me). I'll explain: if I had balls, I'd say with all my strength: we've never spoken plainly here. I lay down among you, blinded in agony, my tiger-desires still burning, lying motionless in my own blood. The preachers stand and gather the others, explaining why it'd be impossible for me; if people listen to me it's because there's always a small crowd around an accident. I'm losing blood as I speak.

Agony, I'm at ease in the wound, no longer embarrassed, I am content. Would I hold a grudge aganst those who hear me, for making me consider myself a man? No, I'm content, the show's over, what a relief!

... speaking to others. To feel my lucidity, my malice. Ultimately my solitude is so perfect that with a stroke of my pen I can destroy any spectators, by scratching them out. From the moment I begin to write, I'll spend a lot of time striking (through)out, tearing apart, burning, and eluding the others.

I am no longer a man, in agony I speak... to those I can strike through(out). I can eternally strike them .through(out.) Those who hear reply: have we heard? do we still have ears?

Forever the naïve insistence of “nature” wanting to make a dawn of what will come as well as the falling night. Always, to be is the sound of broken chains. The naïveté of nature has commenced again: nothing can rejuvenate it, it might as well be brought back to dawn. Agony is a song of love: tears and blood flow: through tears the sky appears in the blinding red of blood.

blindness of dawnkiss of blooddeathmy cry

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silenceall silence

Tigers, judges. On Monday the robes of judges reassure. Those of tigers turn ones stomach. But on Tuesday? the opposite.

The week being over: no more days, no more judges, no more tigers, endless night of dregs, yawns, innocence, blood.

Doves and lambs flee from this world. Lambs in the talons of eagles. Let the intelligence of eagles die in denial and annihilate itself in the mud. None of you know that in this mud, in its stench, an angel with anguished tiger-eyes is submerged and orgasms from the agony of drowning.

tiger's innocencetiger's agonyangel-mother

by dint of dyingby dint of laughterby dint of indifferenceand immodestythe womb opens like a fall into the voidGIVING BIRTHslaughteringbreaking fingers

(The tiger-eyed angel-mother gives to the day a child who burdens, chokes, annihilates man and his memory.)

To strike through the windowpane of the skyblind to dayblind to that which is not youdeath

The star dies death star of ashthe heart God profound silence

youthwar my lover deathdawn star of living limelie heart of ice heart of

waterheart with hoarfrost hairsuch silence

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II

Without evasion I recognize my abuse, my lies. That which I come to write, apart from myself, is false in a certain sense: I am the plaything of deception. In an other sense, I am inspired, in submission to that which I write. No longer as a being without escape, locked within himself like a prison, I suffocate from the moment I write, rather as one lacking the heart to think that which he thought. In this distress, like the struggles of one who is drowning, I remember the rules of rhetoric, seek to produce the effect. I incarnate the desire of the spectators (those who listen), desires that brings them to astonishment.

Ennui is weakness, it is that which is falsely assumed to hold water: but the "child to come" oppresses and suppresses the man in me.

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Through falsehood, indifference, disgust of myself, pure happiness, certainty,

in the bottom of the well – where I am thrown, entirely with myself – tooth against tooth of death, an infinitesimal particle of . . . blinding springs from an accumulation of refuse,

I avoid it, it persists: injected brutally in the forehead, a web of blood flowing from the wound, mixes into a trickle with my tears, and bathes my naked leg,

infinitesimal particle born of negation, of deceits, of poisonous glances, of shameless avarice,

inviolable, unknowable, no less the night, no less indifferent to itself than the totality of the sky,

and the infinite purity of an executioner, the naked seduction of the furnace, of an cutting explosion, of an edifice changed into a rain of the dead

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naive playful soulpalace of illusions of cruel nuditiesand of hidden princesses grand game of mirrors wreathed in flameswhere the many divest themselvesof images of empy desiresI open in myself a theaterwhere a false sleep is playingan aimless shama disgrace that sickens me

no hopedeaththe candle blown out

enoughI biteI'll howl

sweat interrogateswhat am I?what do I know?

dogI will be playedmanthat's even more fals

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Even stranger.Lucidity lies next to deceit, the dream of knowing nothing, of

becoming the night, of being a heavy blow, unintelligible to oneself. Bird's desires, the megalomania of a toad.

It seems to me that going to the full depth of things promotes an inescapable falsehood.

Meanwhile, I'm reading The Nights of October, surprised at feeling an incongruity between my cries and my life. At bottom, I am like Gérard de Nerval, happy with cabarets, with trifles (more equivocal?). I remember in Tilly my fondness for the people of the village, when the rains, mud, and cold had ended, the bar viragos handling the bottles, and the noses (the snouts) of the big farm domestics (drunk, muddily shod); at night the rural songs would weep in the common throats; there was the coming and going of carousal, farting, laughter, and girls in the courtyard. I was happy to listen to their life, scribbling in my notebook, lying in bed in a dirty (and chilly) room. Not a hint of ennui, happy with the warmth of the cries, with the charm of the songs: their melancholy caught one's throat.

The general ease one has in negation, in a mathematical point of coincidence between happy virility and the nostalgia of delirium.

In negation, childishness and the feeling of nothingness exhaust themselves: existence makes itself enduring, rigorous, beyond reproach. Negation, however, is no guarantee of actual passion. Without negation, there has not been passion, no exhaustive affirmation, but manufactured active will, the impudence of a preacher.

I submit to profound affirmation, it cries within me as daylight in the sky. The love in me, the nostalgia of death, are, like me, strangers, as is the sun to the space that it illumines, but death embraces me just as the day embraces space.

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The Temple Roof

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Long conversation with T. (anguish, chance, the night out of which we emerge surrounding us...) Pursued by an intimate « final demand»: 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 « final demand »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...

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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 POSSIBLITIES OF BEING

HOW CAN I EXPRESS MY FEELING?

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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. »

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

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Just one phrase from Bérénice struck me: « this majestic sorrow which makes pleasure from tragedy... »

I read The Raven. I remained frozen, in contact with contagion. I got up and found some paper. I recall the febrile haste with which I reached the table and I was then calm. I was absorbed in myself and thrown into my proper void. I wrote in my night as one called upon.

a sandstormadvancedI cannot saythat in the nightshe advanced like a wall turned to dustor like the draped swirl of a phantomshe said to mewhere are youI had lost youbut Iwho had never seen her

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shouted in the coldwho are youdemented womanand why pretendnot to forget meat the moment I hear the fall of the skyI ranthrough an endless fieldI fellthe field also fella boundless sob the field and I fell

starless nightempty a thousand times extinguisheddid a cry like thatever pierce youa fall as dark as that

At the same time I would have had to make it heard that love was consuming me. I was limited by words. I was exhausted by love in the void, like being in the presence of a desirable, undressed – yet inaccessible – woman. Without even being able to express a desire.

As if the anguish of T. had held me fast. As if T. chose my words.

Stupor. Impossible to go to bed in spite of the hour and fatigue. I could have said about myself what Kierkegaard said a hundred years ago: “My head is as empty as a theater in which there has just been a performance.”

As I stared into the void before me, a touch – immediately violent, excessive – joined me to that void. I saw that emptiness and saw nothing – but it, the emptiness embraced me. My body was contracted. It shrank as if it had meant to reduce itself to the size of a point. A lasting fulguration extended from that inner point to the void. I grimaced and I lauged, with my lips drawn back, my teeth bared.

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I throw myself amongst the dead

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The night is my nuditythe stars are my teeth

I throw myself amongst the deaddressed in white sunlight

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Death dwells in my heartlike a little widow

she sobs she is weakI'm afraid I could vomit

The widow laughs right up to the heavensand tears apart the birds

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At my deaththe horse teeth of te starswhinny with laughter i deathblank deathmoist fall into the graveone-eyed sun

the gravedigger with teeth of deatheffaces me

the angel flying upon wings of a crowcries

glory to thee

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The angel the empty void of caskets

and the absence of you mein the entire universe

the horns of joyresound senselesslyand the eye of the sun explodes

death's thunderfills the universe

too much joyturns back the nails more than madness

I imaginein the infinite depthsthe expanse, deserteddifferent from the sky that I seeno longer containing those quivering points of lightbut torrents of fireoverflowing the skymore blinding than the dawnformless abstractionstriated with fracturespile

of forgotten inanities

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On one side the subject Ion the other the objectuniverse littered with dead notionswhere I thrown the detritusgestures of impotencegaspsthe discordant cock-crow of ideas

o manufactures nothingnessin the factory of infinite vanitylike a trunk full of false teeth

I leaning on the trunkI feelmy envy to desire envyo collapseecstasy from which I fall asleepwhen I cry outyou who are and will bewhen I will be no moreX deafgiant malletbreaks open my head.

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The scintillationthe height of the sky

the earthand me

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My heart spits you out star

anguish beyond compare

I laugh to myself but I'm cold.

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To Be Orestes:Exercise of Meditation

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The gaming table is the starry night where I fall, cast like the die on a field of ephemeral possibilities.

I see no reason to “find fault” with it.

Being a blind fall in the night, I exceed my will in spite of myself (which is only the given within me); and my fear is the cry of an infinite freedom.

If I did not exceed nature, in a leap beyond “the static and the given,” I would be defined by laws. But nature plays me, casting me further than herself, beyond the laws, the limits that make humble people love her.

I am the outcome of a game, that which if I were not, would not be, might not be.

Within [the breast of]an immensity, I am a more exceeding that immensity. My happiness and my very being stem from that excessiveness. Fit myself into what surrounds me, explain myself, or see only a children's fable in my unfathomable night (give myself a physical or mythological image of myself)? No! ... I'd renounce the game ...

I refuse, rebel, but why lose my way. Were I to rave, I would be merely natural. Poetic delirium has its place in nature. It justifies nature, consents to embellish it. The refusal belongs to clear consciousness evaluating whatever occurs to it. Clear discrimination of the various possibles, the gift for going to the end of the most distant one, are the province of clear attention. The irrevocable venturing of oneself, the one-way voyage beyond every given require not only that infinite laughter, but also that slow meditation (senseless but through excess).

My stupidity gave its blessing to succoring nature, on her knees, before God.

What I am (my drunken laughter and happiness) is nonetheless at stake, handed over to chance, thrown out into the night, chased away like a dog.

The wind of truth responded like a slap to piety's extended cheek.

The heart is human to the extent that it rebels (this means: to be a man is “not to bow down before the law”).

A true poet doesn't justify – he doesn't accept – nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry

When to accept poetry changes it into its opposite (it becomes the mediator of an acceptance)! I hold back the leap in which I would exceed the universe, I justify the given world, I content myself with it.

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It is penumbra and uncertainty. Poetry removes one from the night and the day at the same time. It can neither bring into question nor bring into action this world that binds me.

The menace of it is maintained: nature can annihilate me – reduce me to that which she is, cancel the game that I play further than she – which demands my infinite madness, my infinite gaiety, my infinite alertness.

Relaxation withdraws one from the game – as does an excess of attention. Enthusiasm, the heedless plunge, and calm lucidity are required of the player, until the day when chance releases him – or life does.

I approach poetry: but only to miss it. In nature's excessive game it makes no difference whether I exceed her or she exceeds herself in me (she is perhaps entirely excess of herself), but, in time, the excess will finally, in the end, take its place in the order of things (I will die at that moment).

It was necessary, in order to grasp a possible within an evident impossibility, for me to imagine the opposite situation first.

Supposing I wish to reduce myself to the lawful order, I have little chance of succeeding completely: I will err through inconsequence – through defective rigor...

In extreme rigor, the exigency of order holds such a great power that it cannot turn back against itself. In the experience of it which devout worshipers (mystics) have, the person of God is placed at the apex of an immoral absurdity: the devout worshiper's love realizes in God – with whom he identifies himself – an excess which if he were to assume it personally would bring him to his knees, demoralized.

The reduction to order fails in any case: formal devotion (devotion without excess) leads to inconsequence. The opposite endeavor has chances, then. It has to use bypaths (laughs, incessant nauseas). There where things are ventured, each element ceaselessly changes into its contrary God suddenly takes on a “horrible grandeur.” Or poetry slips into embellishment. With each effort that I make to grasp it, the object of my anticipation changes into its contrary.

All of poetry's illumination reveals itself outside the beautiful moments which it reaches: in comparison to its failure, poetry grovels.

(A common agreement makes an exception of the two authors who added the luster of a failure to that of poetry. Misunderstanding is linked to their names, but both exhausted the sense of poetry that culminates in its opposite, in a feeling of hatred for poetry. Poetry that does not rise o the non-sense of poetry is only the hollowness of poetry, is only beautiful poetry.)

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For Whom Are These Serpents?Being is that Contestation that it makes

of Being in Itself

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IIThe Malady of Arthur Rimbaud

The path upon which man is so engaged as to place nature into question is essentially negative. It puts contestation into contestation, makes rapid movements and quick breaks, excitations and depressions.

The movement of poetry departs from the known and leads toward the unknown. It touches upon the madness it brings to pass. But at the approach of madness a retreat begins. That which is not quite entirely poetry does not induce this retreat. The movement toward poetry, thereby the poetry of madness, seeks to remain within the limits of the possible. Poetry is in every way the negation of itself: in itself it preserves nothing of itself while negating and exceeding itself.

The negation that exceeds poetry is in every case the other consequence of a retreat. Driven to madness the poet can sink. However, madness has no more than poetry than as means of maintaining itself in poetry. If it is the poets and madmen – as it is the mimicry of one and the other – poets and madmen are only fixed moments. The limit of the poet is, in itself, similar to that of the madmen, in which they personally reach that which is not within the limits of human life. Halted moments mark not allowing that wreckage of means which are maintained within themselves. The movement of water is only one halted moment.

The following text marks, at the same time, consciousness of the personal collapse that these impersonal movement which it pursues. It expresses poetry engaged in its proper negation. But that which touches on the knowledge of itself is simply desire, evocation, it is the void, the chaos, unleashed by poetry: the proper distinction is not to be made between madness, to which one succumbs, and the rational exhaustion of the possibilities of being. Madness is masked beneath the appearance of a willed experience, and that will beneath the appearance of derangement. Inviability proceeds from an excess of desire – directed at the same tie by many senses – in advance collapse feels fatigued suppressing the spirit of excessive desire and exacerbation

<<The first study...>> (Letter to Izembard of May 13th 1871)Failure is the measure of that which is at stake. Excitation is the the

announcement of depression. Poetry is negated by a displacement. The poet, no sooner than he destroys language, re-fashions a false world by means of these decomposed figures, but it is man himself who, tired of the game, would make of the kingdom of madness an object of real conquest. That collapse which anticipation indicates and can not see is the difference between the collapse undergone (madness or the equivalent, pure negation) and the search for possibilities of and beyond this collapse. These two moments are themselves confused as one, as with poetry itself.

III

The greatness of Rimbaud is to have lead poetry to the failure of poetry. Poetry is not a knowledge of itself, The unknown and death . . . without bovine silence, the only kind strong enough on such paths. In that unknown, blind, I succumb (I renounce the reasoned

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exhaustion of possibles).

Poetry is not a knowledge of oneself, and even less the experience of a remote possible (of that which, before, was not) but rather the simple evocation through words of inaccessible possibilities.

Evocation has the advantage over experience of richness and an endless facility but it distances one from experience (which is essentially paralyzed).

Without the exuberance of evocation, experience would be rational. It begins to emanate from my madness, if the impotence of evocation disgusts me.

Poetry opens the night to desire's excess. In me, the night abandoned by the ravages of poetry is the measure of a refusal – of my mad will to exceed the world – Poetry also exceeded this world, but it could not change me. For servitude to the bonds of nature it substitutes the liberty of verbal association: verbal association destroys those bonds which one wants but by virtue of words.

My fictitious freedom tightened the constraints of the natural given more than it weakened them. If I had been content with it, in the end I would have yielded to the limit of that given.

I continued to question the world's limit, seeing the wretchedness of anyone who is content with it, and I couldn't bear the facility of fiction for long: I demanded its reality, I became mad. My madness can feel the outside world, demanding that one change in the function of poetry. The demand turned toward the internal life demands a power which belongs only to equivocal existence. In one case or the other, I achieve the experience of the void, just as well with the interior as with the exterior.

Madness is the absence of renunciation. If I lie, I remain in the domain of poetry, of verbal transcendence of the world. If I persevere in a blind disparagement of the world, my disparagement is false (like transcendence). Or no longer knowing how, for myself alone, to act out of the farce of a delirium, I again become mad, but inwardly: I experience the night.

Poetry is simply a detour: through it I escape the discursive world, which has become for me the natural world; with poetry I enter a sort of tomb where the infinity of the possible is born from the death of the logical world.

Logic on its death bed gives birth to mad riches. But the possible that's evoked is only unreal, the death of the logical world is unreal, everything is shadowed and fleeting in that relative darkness. I can make light of myself and of others in that darkness: all the real is valueless, every value unreal! Whence that facility and that fatality of equivocations, where I don't know if I am lying or if I am mad. Night's necessity springs from that unhappy

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situation.

The night could only proceed by way of a detour. The questioning of all things resulted from the exasperation of a desire, which could not come to bear on the void.

The object of my desire was illusion first of all and could be the void of disillusion only in the second instance.

Questioning without desire is formal, immaterial. About it we cannot say, “It's the same thing as man.”

Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.

Dazzled by a thousand figures composed of worry, impatience and love. Now my desire has just one object: the beyond of those thousand figures, and the void which destroys.

Remaining dazzled, knowing, – having a vague awareness – that these figures are dependent upon the facility (the absence of rigor) from which they had been born, I can voluntarily maintain this ambiguity. Then disorder, suffering and a little satisfaction given me the feeling of being mad. These poetic figures, in their brilliance, take hold of a destruction of the real, remaining at the mercy of nothingness, to which must come very close, portray themselves in their ambiguous and desirable aspect: already, they have an unknown empty absence and blind the eyes. Rigor is hostile to those who desire these (they signify prosaic poverty).

If I have (but for which reasons?) maintained rigor in me, I have not known these figures of desire. My desire raises itself toward the glimmers of disorder, to the center of a transfigured world. Rising desire imposes on me the necessity of rigor. Rigor dissipates these poetic figures, desire is at last in the night.

But human desire has the unknown, it is as though to speak of the night precisely as its object. The night is first of all the negation of desire. It can not appear in an object, its game annihilates the object, and therein discovers the void. My existence in the night resembles that of the lover at the death of his beloved, of Orestes learning of Hermione's suicide. In the form that night takes, existence cannot recognize “what it anticipated.” Being is in the night like the lover at the death of the beloved (Orestes hearing of the suicide of Hermione) : he cannot recognize it in this kind of night – “that which he desires”. Desire cannot know in advance that it is the desire of its own proper negation. The night in which it sinks in vain not only like the objects of the first desire, but every

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object of knowledge is in the first place the very same horror. In it every value annihilates itself and there as one enters there (only enters in it) the summit of desire, (one can only tolerate it in) it nauseates.

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