Derechos conexos

Saturday , February

1 9 , 1 93 8

[This time it is not because h e did not write it out, but rather because illness made him interrupt his participation in the activities of the College, that we do not have the text by Caillois that is announced in the program . Bataille spoke in his place . And, as he mentions, to the extent that it was possible, he spoke ac­

cording to Caillois 's instructions .

Many of the points tackled in this lecture are to b e found in L' Homme e t le sacre, which Caillois was writing during the period the College was active; it ap­

peared during the summer of 1939. Chapter 3 of this work ( "Le Sacre de re­

spect: theorie des interdits ' ') groups the analyses as they relate to the problem of power (see, especially, the sections: "La Genese du pouvoir, " "Le Fait du pouvoir, donnee immediate, " "Caractere sacre du pouvoir ") . This chapter is the first panel of a diptych where it contrasts with chapter 4, ' 'Le Sacre de trans­

gression: theorie de la jete, ' ' which Caillois will read before the College about a year later, on May 2 , 1 939.

In the NRF of October 1937, Caillois published a note on Leon Blum, who had resigned in June . Blum had published under the title L' Exercice du pouvoir, the collection of texts he had written and delivered as president of the Council of the Popular Front. What follows is taken from this note: "I take the liberty of speaking, " writes Caillois, "about the conception of power that appears in the writings of Leon Blum ; I take the liberty of criticizing it independently f om the historical circumstances in which this conception was tested and this power ex­

ercised. Power, in effect, whether exercised or submitted to, is a kind of imme­

diate conscious data, toward which a being has an elementmy reaction of

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tion or repulsion . Furthermore, the analysis of social phenomena demonstrates that power necessarily belongs to the domain of the sacred. The power of one be­

ing over others sets up a relationship among them that cannot be reduced to the pure forms of contract. It draws its power from the very essence of the social phenomenon and manifests its imperative aspect with no intermedimy or loss of energy. It also seems as if power were impregnated with the sacred, or were, rather, its ve1y source, ^so much so that one hesitates to choose which term de­

fines the other. The world ofpmver is indeed tragedy 's world; there it is impos­

sible to go back on any act once it is committed. Saint-Just (who was the first to assert that one does not rule innocently, while making a king ' s head fall with this maxim) also made a rare and implacable use of power. kfter the Sylla of Montesquieu 's dialogue, Saint-Just 's use of power provided the most brilliant lesson to be contemplated in these matters . Leon Blum does not have this pon­

tifical conception of power. It is clear that, for Blum , legality is the basis of power. It is to be feared, rather, that it is power that is the basis of legality . All power is severe; it is almost destroyed and certainly sapped if it is not abused whenever deemed necessmy . The coercer has a terrible and, in a sense, inexpi­

able responsibility . But either you take it or you /eave it; when coercion must be exerted, when order must be born, even respect for the law is null and void. "

Bataille 's elaborations will not respect point for point Caillois 's view on power as formulated in this note . Particularly, where Caillois identifies power with tragedy, Bataille once again distinguishes them from each other. He op­

poses the power that kills and the power that dies, the /ictor 's ax that makes unity rule with a peremptory, cutting gesture and the cross that propagates a tragic coJ/llllllllion of heartrending agony . The militmy structure of power e,\ports the works of death, the religious structure takes them on itself in order to e.\piate the authority with which it is cloaked. But in this Christian type of religious struc­

ture, Bataille reverses the consecrated identifications: Now one must identify no longer with Christ but with his executioners, not with the king who dies but with the regicide . It is by means of this displacement that religion becomes tragedy and piety is converted into shamanistic energy.}

First I must excuse Caillois. He was to have made the presentation that I shall make today in his place . His health has made it necessary for him to give up tem­

porarily any activity , at least as far as circumstances permit . Just in the past few days I have been able to see him and project with him what he would have said if I had not had to replace him . Frankly , it is difficult for me purely and simply to replace Caillois and limit myself to saying what would have seemed to him es­

sential . In fact , I am bound to continue the development of what I have already begun on the subject of power. I am bound to relate the essential facts about power to the body of principles I have attempted to introduce here. If Caillois had spoken today , he would have detailed the facts at great length . After his

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sentation I would have been led to attempt connecting them to general ideas . Re­

placing Caillois , I shall limit myself to summarizing what is essential of the facts , and , on the whole , what I shall say will be the commentary on and an at­

tempt at analysis of these facts . And naturally this endeavor will be only a continuation of everything that I have already developed in my two preceding presentations .

Therefore , at the outset, I should recall the essentials of these two presenta­

tions. Afterward I shall move on to the facts that have to do with power, and to conclude , I shall attempt a general interpretation .

As I go back to what I have said , I shall not content myself, moreover, with repeating or summarizing it. This time I shall try to give a precise form to the statement of several fundamental propositions , which up until now have not clearly emerged from the description as a whole .

It is possible to consider the conglomeration- town , city , or village - as the fundamental element of human society . We shall soon see that conglomerations are able to join together, forming unities, even unities that are vast. The con­

glomeration , in any case , is at the root of all empires somewhat as the cell is at the root of every organism -or also as individual persons are at the root of every conglomeration . I chose the example of a French village in order to study the structure of the human conglomeration in its simplest fmm . But perhaps I did not insist enough on the fact that what was in question was a formation that is not complete , that is not primitive , and moreover is obviously degenerate . The con­

temporary French village is something whose functioning is clogged , something barely alive, even compared with the French village of a century ago . As it i s , however, the traces o f a powerful " overall movement" animating the village population are still very easily perceived there . This overall movement is made up of two opposite forces , one centripetal , the other centrifugal . The center is a church forming a stable nucleus with a well-defined sacred character. The oppo­

site forces are , moreover, composed in a very special way . There is an attraction toward a group of ritual objects and acts , but the force of repulsion increases as the force of attraction is active , with the result that individuals who are attracted are held within the power of the sacred center at a respectful distance. The two forces are somehow functions of each other. The overall movement that conse­

crates the conglomeration ' s unity , moreover, is not constant. It takes place on regularly repeating dates and also each time some event occurs to modify the es­

tablished relations among those revolving around the center- birth , marriage , or death .

Last time I insisted on the fundamental character of this movement, and I took advantage of the very simplified character it provides in some examples close at hand in order to base a very general , but still perfunctory reflection on the facts . Today , however, I shall have to insist on the extreme complexity peculi ar to the

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" overall movements " animating human communities . If things are so simple in a village , it is because a village no longer represents a totality . It is not up to the village to take on itself the entirety of human functions . Certain integrations nec­

essary to the affective activity of society are produced only in the capital , which alone realizes the extreme complexity of the movement . All that is necessary , however, is to go back to a relatively recent period, one in which the 11onuments or mins are still numerous , to rediscover the memory of this complexity - at least in a number of villages where the church was doubled by a fortified castle . In the Middle Ages, a simple conglomeration could actually possess almost total auton­

omy , constituting by itself a complete picture of social life . 1 The power was con­

centrated in the person of the feudal lord , who struck coins , rendered justice , and had an armed force at his disposal .

Taking this new aspect of things into account , I have been led to formulate some general propositions , this time quite precise and more complete .

A conglomeration presents a specific overall movement around a nucleus ­ mobile or stable , a complex of sacred places , objects , persons , beliefs , and prac­

tices . If it possesses autonomy - as in primitive or feudal civilizations -it also presents a movement of concentration of power that is l inked with the movement produced around sacred things.

This all must seem very obscure . Initially it was very hard for me to represent convincingly the fundamental and vital animation , which the sacred engenders through shock as it were . And now I am speaking of another kind of animation linked -by what obscure connections?-to the first . This other kind of animation is the concentration of power , and as to the nature of this power about which es­

sentially I shall be speaking today , I have to first limit myself to getting rid of the current interpretation .

Obviously I am eager to joggle the accepted truth , which has it that if the po­

lice lock me up in prison it is because they are stronger than I. It is power that creates the force of the police , not the police who create power. 2 Armed force without power, without the authority that makes use of it, could never have any more meaning or applicability than the force of a volcano . But what then does this power mean -this power that we must admit, no matter how revolutionary and capable of challenge we are , reduces us to trembling before it because , at a cet1ain point, offending it means death .

A month ago now , in order to make myself understood , I took a roundabout way and sought to make those effects produced in the center of social things per­

ceptible by analyzing the ones produced on the periphery , like the contagious movement of laughter. 3 I am not entirely certain that this method really made me more intelligible up to this point, but I believe in the virtue of persistence , and again today I shall take the same roundabout way I did a month ago .

I assume that a certain number of my present listeners have seen (I think this goes back to 1 936) a newsreel showing the unveiling of a monument to the

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glish dead at Vimy .4 At the proper moment President Lebrun5 appeared on the screen in his morning coat and rushed headlong onto a platform from which he began to shout stirring words . At that moment most of the audience began to laugh . I myself could hear the unrestrained laughter that had taken hold of me spread throughout the rows of a movie theater. And I have heard that the same

thing was repeated elsewhere.

I do not think the fact that dead men were involved could have contributed in anything other than a secondary manner to the excitement thus manifested in roars of laughter. But-precisely -President Lebrun embodies this power that I have described as representing , at least if we take into account the passions ob­

scm·ely urging us on to excess , a threat of death. I know that these obscure pas­

sions are normally held in check and even banished from the realm of conscious­

ness . I know that whatever the case , the threat of death represented by power is also banished from the realm of consciousness . However, on the whole , power remains a simu ltaneously seductive and femful reality for human beings , and it is always somewhat disappointing for the ordinary mentality if the external aspect of power has nothing seductive or fearful about it. At the very least, such a dis­

appointment is still compensation for another sort of satisfaction that may be re­

garded as more estimable . B ut if the external aspect goes as far as the absence of dignity , if it offers no more than the awkward and empty solemnity of someone who has no direct access to greatness - who must seek it out by some artificial means , in the same way as people who do not really have power at their disposal but who are reduced to nervously aping greatness the futile hoopla making its appearance where motionless majesty is expected no longer provokes just disap­

pointment: It provokes hilarity . Those present - at least before an image pro­

jected on a screen emphasizing absurdities and greatly mitigating any feeling of reality -those present no longer communicate in the double movement of attrac­

tion and repulsion that keeps a unanimous adherence at a respectful distance;

rather they regain their communion by laughing with a single laughter.

As those who have heard my previous presentations can see , I have just re­

peated the two essential themes I have already developed: the theme of the for­

mation at the center of a human group of a nucleus of attraction and repulsion , and the theme of peripheral laughter stimulated by the continual emissions of a specific energy , of sacred forces , which are made from the central nucleus .

All I shall do today is carry on with these themes , but for the first time I shall be able to attempt a representation of the overall movement.

Having reintroduced the fundamental problem I was eager to pose , I shall now move to laying out the facts , that is to say , specific forms in which power ap­

pears to us . Starting with these facts , these general forms , I shall latch onto an example that is much more explicit than any other of the formation of power, namely , the formation of power constructed on the basis of the ignominious cru­

cifixion of Jesus . Then I shall return to the monument to the dead at Vimy in

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der to complete the cycle . I have already widely used the terms left and right to define a fundamental opposition between the ignoble and the noble , the impure and the pure . This time I shall attempt to desctibe from beginning to end the dy­

namic transfmmation of left into right, then of right into left, moving from the horrible i mage of a torture victim to the majesty of popes and kings , then from the majesty of sovereigns to the Vichy morning coat6 .

But first of all , what are the common fotms in which what we call power appears?

It is possible to say that in the great majority of cases power appears individ­

ualized , that is to say , embodied in a single person . 7 The name " king" is ordi­

narily given to this person , and it is possible to maintain this by taking into ac­

count the fact that certain differences of name in a given area do not mean much.

So the name caesar, kaiser, or czar, after having signified the Romans' phobia for the tetm rex, ended up by simply meaning the great king, or the king of kings- something analogous to the Persian shahanshah . Similar elements , in any case , are found in the sovereigns of every region and every period.

On the whole , the king represents a dynamic concentration of all the impulses socially animating individuals . He is somehow charged with all that is willed ­ impersonally - within society . 8 Every human community requires that the order of the world , the order of nature , be maintained. Catastrophes must be averted and conditions favorable for the hunt , for breeding stock , for harvests , must be realized . But this requirement is not manifested only as desire , it is also inune­

diately felt as an effective power. And this power to realize the common desire is transferred to the king , who becomes solely responsible . The king , precisely , is the guarantor of the order of things: Hence, if things are disrupted, he must be incriminated . 9

I shall not detail facts here . The eleven volumes of Frazer's Golden Bough were devoted to studying the prerogatives of primitive kings and the taboos im­

posed on them . It will suffice to recall that Frazer took for his departure practices relating to the priest of Nemi and his ritual slaying . 1° Frazer remarked that the priest miginally was royal and that the murder could be linked to his being so . He recognized that kings , in fact, could be put to death by their people and that the royal office often had been less to be envied than to be feared. Because the king is the object of a concentration of collective feelings , he is simultaneously , in fact, the object of precautions that are distrustful and very awkward for him . He is treated like a sacred thing , and sacred things have to be protected from con­

tacts by means of a great many paralyzing prohibitions . And if it so happens that the process ceases to be effective , if it happens that the order of things is dis­

rupted despite royal action, the king can be put to death and sacrificed as a scape­

goat , ^{1 1} charged with the sins that were in conflict with the normal course of na­

ture . The repulsion that, up until that point, had kept the subjects in a vetitable religious terror is abruptly transformed into a murderous repulsion .

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The concentration o f feelings or reactions o f the social body onto one person obviously must result in an ambiguous situation , which i s , moreover, analogous to the situation of sacred things in general- objects of attraction and repulsion . Furthermore , it can take other forms than that of the relatively rare killing . To

The concentration o f feelings or reactions o f the social body onto one person obviously must result in an ambiguous situation , which i s , moreover, analogous to the situation of sacred things in general- objects of attraction and repulsion . Furthermore , it can take other forms than that of the relatively rare killing . To