Military discipline and revolutionary exaltation: The dismantling of "l'illusion lyrique" in Malraux's L'Espoir and Bataille's Le Bleu Du Ciel

Romanic Review, Nov 2000 by Boldt-Irons, Leslie Anne

Bataille's only real experience of combat and war is extremely limited. He was enlisted briefly in the First World War in 1916 at the age of 19, but sent home a year later due to health problems. Yet in the 1930's he was a committed writer of tracts and articles proclaiming the need for a proletariat revolution. This revolution, as envisaged by Bataille, would channel the forces of hatred, rage, revolt and violence, but would begin from a fundamental and primordial anguish, without which all revolution loses its impetus:

Mais aujourd'hui, si l'affectivite revolutionnaire n'a plus d'autre issue que le malheur de la conscience, elle y revient comme a sa premiere maitresse. Dans le malheur seulement, elle retrouve l'intensite douloureuse sans laquelle la resolution fondamentale de la Revolution, le ni Dieu ni maitres des ouvriers revoltes perd sa brutalite radicale.10

The importance of anguish and its role as founding principle or stimulus of revolutionary activity cannot be overestimated in Bataille's political theory. Only anguish is pervasive and destabilizing enough to set off the series of contagious and destructive actions that mark revolutionary agitation:

Si un mouvement reel se produisait naissant d'une aussi grande angoisse, il devrait prendre necessairement le caractere brulant, imprevisible, contagieux a l'extreme, des grands mouvements religieux qui ont deja bouleverse les peuples et leur ont revele la valeur universelle de l'existence [ ... ] l'angoisse de la Terre entiere.11

However, if the revolutionary impulse begins in anguish and is sustained by it, it would have no concrete effect if it were not marked by fury, hatred, revolt and violence. "Seule la `violence du desespoir", writes Bataille, "est assez grande pour fixer l'attention [ ... ] sur le probleme fondamental de l'Etat" (PE, 335). This violence of despair is coupled by "un aveuglement maladif" (PE, 335) both of which are necessary if power is to be seized from the State: "pour s'emparer du pouvoir" "une violence imperative" is necessary.12 For Bataille, power will only ever be exerted by the proletariat if there is realized "une intraitable dictature du peuple arme" (UL, 380). But since this power must remain both organized and explosive, a tricky and almost unattainable balancing act is required.

For the Bataille of these early tracts and articles, proletarian violence would remain ineffective if it failed to become a disciplined and organized force. "C'est la creation organique d'une vaste composition de forces, disciplinee, fanatique, capable d'exercer le jour venu one autorite impitoyable" (UL, 380). This composition of forces, though disciplined, must however be wedded to the violence that inspires it: "Une telle composition de forces doit grouper l'ensemble de ceux qui [ ... ] exigent de vivre conformement a la violence immediate d'etre humain (UL, 380)." Indeed, it is the element of violence that distinguishes the discipline of the proletarian revolution from the "servile" discipline required by the fascists: