Análisis del cumplimiento de los objetivos de las normas financieras

Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois

Saturday, April

2 , 1 93 8

[This title and date are announced on the program the College had had printed of its activities . Just as with Bataille 's other lectures, the manuscript has, in­ stead of a title, only the date written in his hand (here it heads the only two pages that have been preserved of this lecture) .

They begin with a report calling for a first muwal assessment of their activi­ ties : " We have now come to the end of the cycle of lectures begun last Novem ­ ber . ' ' From what one can il!fer from the first lines, it seems, indeed, that this session , at least as far as Batail/e 's intervention is concemed (but was Caillois now well ?), was presented as a summary of the theoretical knowledge acquired during the past year. In order to measure this knowledge against the original ambitions of the College, the summaJ)' was accompan ied by the rereading of what Bataille calls "the first text that united us . " Of course, this text is still to be identified. It can as easily be the "Note " published a year earlier by Acephale (see p . 5) (and soon to be resumed, expanded, and completed by Caillois in his introduction to the collection ' 'For a College of Sociology ' ') , as any of the texts read during the preliminal)' meetings that took place at the Grand V�four in March 193 7 (in particular Caillois 's " Winter Wind " and Bataille 's "Sorcerer 's Apprentice , " probably now being written) .

But assessment o r no, in one voice o r two, and whatever its contents, this lec­ ture was to lose in the following weeks its proclaimed position . It was not to be the last lecture in 1937-38: One certainly, and perhaps two others, followed it in May . Certain is the meeting of May 19, during which Klossowski would read his translation of Kierkegaard 's Antigone and Denis de Rougemont a chapter of

1 58 D SACRED SOCIOLOGY OF THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

his forthcoming L' Amour et ! 'Occident . A possible second: The session of May 19 was, says Klossowski, "devoted to tragedy, " and the NRF announced in its May bulletin : "At the College of Sociology, Bataille and Caillois will speak on the subject of myth , " which would certainly lead one to suppose yet another meeting.]

We have now come to the end of the cycle of lectures begun last November. I do not think it is pointless to reread today the first text that united us and that rather clearly shows the goal we set ourselves . I do not think it is pointless be­ cause it seems to me that , to a rather great extent , we have carried out the project we fonnulated.

I remind you that, as we moved toward its realization , we began by refening to the results achieved by contemporary sociology . It was right here that Caillois enumerated the works that have been our points of departure . This enumeration was to result in the publication of a brief bibliography - which we have tempo­ rarily had to abandon , especially because of Caillois ' s i llness . Nonetheless , we gathered quite a lot of material, in good enough order that this publication can be envisaged in the near future . 1

Since the facts we relied on were clear enough , we attempted to define our personal position . Caillois spoke of nco-organicism and biologism. Without ac­ cepting too restrictive a definition , it is true, my statements were along the same lines as Caillois' s . In any case , we follow Durkheim in agreeing that there is something other than a sum of individual actions in the social phenomenon . Per­ sonally , during the numerous presentations I came to be in charge of, I attempted to represent society as a field of forces whose movement , it is true , can be dis­ cerned in us, but forces that are , in any case, external to the needs and conscious

will of each individual . I insisted on the fact that at each level of beings, from atom to molecule , from polymolecular formation to micellar formation , from cell to organism and to society , the structures composed are different from the sum of their components in being joined by an overall movement. It is this over­ all movement, and it alone , that disappears with our death . If you follow me, there would no longer be any grounds to speak of life as a principle. Nor would there be any grounds for placing a given form of life , as , for example , human life , on the same level as the cellular processes to which it seems possible to re­ duce it. Existence would change nature each time it passed from one structural level to the structural level above it. This comes down to saying that the mole­ cule composed of atoms is an inconceivable reality for a mind that knew only at­ oms because the molecule adds the molecular overall movement to atoms . From one stage to the next, from structure to more complex structure , it is possible to arrive at society and to show that the process of not seeing a social phenomenon external to individuals would be as absurd as not seeing[ . . . ] . 2

Tragedy