Play, Sovereignty, and the Refusal of Work: Bataille’s Challenge to Modern Thought

This is Left Hand, and I am your host, Srepti, a.k.a. Craig, also of the Acid Horizon podcast. Today's recording of the podcast happens on a chilly May morning here in early spring on a mountaintop where we have lost power. And I have not had power for the past few days. I had to charge my laptop at a truck stop. And in order to get to the truck stop, I had to drive about six or seven miles. But that said, we should have just enough juice to keep us going for this particular recording. I am not on my regular studio rig, so I apologize if there is a slight degradation in sound quality. Hopefully, there shouldn't be. In any case, there are some announcements that I have, but I will leave those to the end of the recording. Hopefully, you will listen to them. And if you don't, all of the relevant information will be in the show notes for this particular episode. It has been a long time coming, but I was waiting for George Bataille's Critical Essays 2, put out by Segal Press, and I had pre-ordered it—I believe it was in November or December of last year—and had not received it. But on a recent trip to New York City, I was in a bookstore in Brooklyn, and I saw a copy. And I could not wait, so I purchased, despite having pre-ordered the book, which I'm probably just going to cancel at this point. And I must say that us Anglophone readers of the work of Bataille and the many other French philosophers that many of us are interested in have been fully deprived, not being able to read the complete works of Bataille in the original French. And I have to say, I was extremely impressed with many of the essays that were compiled in this particular edition, which span Bataille's writings in the post-war period, from 1949 to 1951. Really, like I said, there are so many great essays in this book. And on the Acid Horizon podcast, we will soon welcome back Stuart Kendall to talk about Bataille's writing during the war, during the French occupation, and after the war, charting his trajectory, particularly on the topic of war and Bataille's theory of war. We have come to the conclusion that Bataille is an unsung theorist of war, or at least it could be said that when we think of theorists of war, Bataille is somebody who does not immediately come to mind in comparison to Thomas Hobbes, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, or some theorist like that. And it seems that many of the essays that are included in this edition of Critical Essays, even if war is not the central topic, it always seems to be the case that Bataille brushes past the concept of war or the topic of war, even when he's talking about literature, for example. And even the essay that I chose for the topic of this particular talk, Are We Here to Play or to Be Serious?, is not about war per se, although war plays a very important part in Bataille's concept of play and the writer that he is reacting to in this essay, Johann Heusinger. The reasons that I chose this particular essay from the book to talk about are many. One of the reasons is this is one of the longest and most robust essays that you will find in this particular volume. But not only that, play and the ludic mode of existence, the connection between play and anarchy and forms of life, has been a topic that has long interested me. So I thought I would do my best to give some coverage to this essay without revealing all of its elements so that you could enjoy some of it on your own. But I always think the concept of play and revolution and left-wing politics is always a timely topic, particularly during times when it seems like the far right is ascendant in the current political milieu and we are asked to become serious in our approach to organizing and our approach to countering the dual factions of the emergent far-right regime and the existing remnants of the neoliberal order, which seem to be diminishing in the face of what's coming next. And one of the criticisms that this channel has gotten from time to time from certain random listeners is that it's easy to fall into the dichotomy of the left-right divide, as it is commonly understood in the United States and in the current global capitalist milieu. But let's make no mistake here. The kind of cultural and economic transformation that George Bataille calls for here and all across his work demands that the profit motive be abolished or be exceeded in some way as to establish some new form of life. He is absolutely cognizant of how the party form in certain forms of left-wing organizing and revolutions have been co-opted by the state form and have folded neatly back into global capitalism. And despite the fact that his philosophical mediators are not traditionally left-wing in some cases, in some cases they are as well, I think we would be hard-pressed to find a kind of abolitionism on the right wing today that would map onto the values of George Bataille. If you think there's one out there, certainly send it my way. I would be curious to see what others believe to be a political orientation that is not left-wing, broadly construed. That seems to map on to the coordinates within which Bataille is operating and theorizing. By making that request, I already know I am going to get cryptocurrency and NFT stuff. And to that, I would respond, I challenge you to keep those sentiments in mind as you read some of the essays in this book where Bataille argues against economies centered on profit and, I would say, by extension, financialization. And that is something that I am willing to be taken to task on. I mean, here's a question for a future episode. Is there a form of exchangist economy that is based on profit, perhaps in even some minimal way that would be amenable to the work of George Bataille? Like I said, I'm open, and the way that I frame the question and pose the challenge leaves it open to a very broad swathe of financial and monetary modalities. But anyway, enough of that. Let's get to today's essay. And as I said, the title of this essay is Are We Here to Play or to Be Serious? And so the way that I would like to begin is by citing a quote that we find very early on in this essay, where Bataille writes, they, meaning everyone, they have nonetheless failed to recognize the part of them that is play. Failed seriously, absolutely, to recognize it. And the provocation that Bataille puts forward right at the very start of this particular essay can be framed, I think, as a series of questions. And the first question would be, has humanity failed to recognize the part of itself that is play? And what has been the cost of that failure? And so looking back, not only at history, but also at the history of philosophy, Bataille brings into focus the ways in which our own civilizational self-understanding has been pegged on the dominance of work, seriousness, religious seriousness, and utility. And of course, not only that, he sets himself up to critique a notion of the subject that has been outlined in terms of work and a subject's capacity to work. A second question that Bataille brings into focus here is, what happens to thought, thinking, philosophy, when it abandons the sacred and the sovereign dimension of play in favor of utility and constraint? So Bataille evinces an incredible skepticism about thought and philosophy in this particular essay, and puts forward the question of whether or not what we call thought has been utterly transmogrified and perhaps even degraded by being solely attached to the notion of work and labor, and that philosophy itself presents itself as a kind of labor activity. Bataille here critiques how a philosophical world has steered thought, and with it action, and has perhaps brought us to an impasse which has preempted the possibility of our greatest freedom. And so it leaves the question then, can thought be emancipated from the philosophical form? And in order to do that, he turns to the work of Johann Huizinga, who talks about how certain ancestral forms of rites and sacraments embodied forms of thinking that are unlike philosophy, but are comparable to philosophy in the sense that they both approach death, but in different ways. Now a third question that I would like to approach in this essay goes something like this. Can play, tragic, sovereign, and bound to death, be recovered as a form of resistance to the world of work, domination, and forced labor? Bataille writes that free thought should finally remember that it, too, began like a game, a tragic game. But somewhere along the way, things went awry, and Bataille's goal is to think the possibility of how play can once again reconnect with its tragic origins, which, if it can, also means that there's a possibility that thought can reconnect with this tragic provenance or domain from which it came. And it is with this particular question that we get a partial reformulation of a theory of revolution, which is that if we can embody the form of play that Bataille is talking about, it might also deliver us to the possibility of achieving a revolution in which we can undermine the hegemony of work. That has constrained the full range of possibilities for the whole of humankind. Now every time we talk about George Bataille, we are going to brush past the concept of sovereignty. And if sovereignty isn't the focus of the discussion, I think we need to do a little bit of a quick and dirty on what sovereignty means for Bataille, especially since his concept of sovereignty differs somewhat from his philosophical peers. And so if this is the first time that you are coming to the work of George Bataille, let's break that down just a little bit. And I don't know if this is the second or third or, I don't know, umpteenth time that you have looked at the work of George Bataille, I think getting a little refresher is always in order. In any case, perhaps the strongest and most pointed definition of sovereignty that we get comes from volume three of The Accursed Share, which, as I understand it, is not a standalone publication in The Accursed Share series, but is part of Bataille's notebooks that were compiled into a final volume of his major work. Now here are a few words from my own personal journal that I often return to for essays like this, which I will repeat again here. And so maybe you've heard me do this spiel before, and in more or less these exact words. The sovereign is the one who is able to consume and enjoy surpluses without submitting themselves to the trappings of labor and productivity. They are able to remove themselves from the order of things. In other words, they are able to live beyond utilitarian purpose. And so the sovereign is someone who has reconciled themselves with the impending reality of death. That's important. They have put themselves at risk. They have inoculated themselves against the representation of death, that is, the anticipation of death projected into the future. And it's this anticipation that produces a kind of futurity, tearing a rift between the present and the future. And this same logic underlies the productivist and utilitarian schemas that Bataille is often struggling against. The dominant axiom of the utilitarian is that one must produce in a way that prepares for what lies ahead. And so another way to think about this is when we project ourselves into the future, we become slaves to an image of the future. We become slaves to the exigency of the future and the sense of necessity that it produces. Now, this is important. This language with slavishness and servility is going to become important in attaching the concept of sovereignty that he puts forward in the accursed chair with what he does in this essay. And it's in the context of this essay that Bataille does invoke the conventional political figure of the sovereign, the one who is endowed with the power to consume surplus in precisely the way that he talks about in the accursed chair. But a crucial addition to the definition I've just offered, especially relevant here, is that the sovereign stands in contrast to the slave, the one who in their fear of death submits to the sovereign in exchange for the preservation of life. This trade, however, comes at a cost of their livelihood and the slaves' feeling of maximal enlivenment and the fundamental meanings that matter most to them. And so simply put, when you become a slave, well, you give up your meanings, your dreams, your aspirations, your goals in exchange for the security that the sovereign gives you or the promise that they won't kill you. But of course, you have to work on behalf of the sovereign. And so this works at the existential level as well, when we as individuals maintain this image of the future that I talked about and project ourselves into it. And now we become a slave to that image. And the cost is failing to live in a kind of immediate, radically present sense where the precipice of death is always before us. And this is something that the sovereign does. And so that's going to be important as we talk about play and seriousness. And when Bataille talks about risk, he's often talking about the sovereign. And so the sovereign is someone who, in their dominance, embraces risk. They embrace intensity and meaning beyond mere survival, preservation, and conservation, even if it puts them in conflict with others vying for the position of sovereignty. And so that's also important. When we get to Bataille's theory of war, we're going to see that he doesn't simply dismiss war on ethical grounds. There's a kind of war, there's a kind of combat that is absolutely enlivening in which the combatants submit themselves, both putting themselves at the precipice of death, which in Bataille's ethics is in fact sound. And we'll get to that. But just as a quick addendum to all of these descriptions, it's important to recognize that throughout his research, Bataille sought not only to theorize sovereignty, but to imagine and found a community in which the experience of sovereignty and the enjoyment of surplus could achieve a form more ecstatic than anything offered by the capitalist or communist milieus of his time. So he remains committed to a collective vision of shared sovereignty, shared ecstasy, communal ecstasy. And the question is, how do we get there? Well, it's going to be through play, as we see in this essay. So back to our original quote, they have nonetheless failed to recognize the part of them that is play, failed seriously, absolutely, to recognize it. And Bataille's essay on play begins as a response to Johann Huizinga's 1949 book Homoludens. And Homoludens, this is put forward as a concept in contrast to the dominant models of Homo sapiens, the man who knows, or man who knows, and homo faber, man who works. Huizinga offers the provocation that it is play, not labor or rationality, that lies at the root of culture and civilization. As Huizinga writes, quote, for many years, the conviction has grown upon me that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play. Traces of such an opinion are to be found in my writings ever since 1903, end quote. And so Bataille is tracking a kind of trajectory of Huizinga's thought, and he believes it reflects a historical moment in which humanity became increasingly subordinated to labor, domination, and utility. Yet he does not treat Huizinga's thesis as a mere curiosity. On the contrary, he respects the precision with which Huizinga defines play, not as a vague metaphor for all human activity, but as something with its own rigor and rules. And this is what Bataille wants to avoid, is having this blanket concept of play that we can talk about the cosmos as a kind of play, that everything is at play in the universe. But then that explains nothing in the end. So how is play then distinguished from work? Bataille is especially drawn to Huizinga's willingness to blur the lines between play and seriousness, as he finds it in rituals, sacrifices, and religious rites, a kind of aesthetic lightness, a ludic dimension that transcends the anxiety often associated with sacred expression. Huizinga continues in Homophober, quote, The child plays in complete seriousness, we can well say in sacred earnest, but it plays and knows that it plays. The actor on the stage is wholly absorbed in his or her playing, but is all the time conscious of the play. The same holds of a good violinist, though they may soar to realms beyond this world. The play character, therefore, may attach to the sublimest forms of action. Huizinga continues, Can we now extend the line to ritual and say that the priest performing the rites of sacrifice is only playing? If we grant it for one religion, we must grant it for all of them. Our ideas of ritual, magic, liturgy, sacrament, and mystery would all fall within the play concept. In dealing with abstractions, we must always guard against overstraining their significance. But all things considered, I do not think we are falling into that error when we characterize ritual as play, end quote. It's this insight, that even the most solemn acts may harbor an undercurrent of play, that opens the space for Bataille's more radical inquiry into sovereignty, death, and the tragic dimension of thought. For Bataille, play is not opposed to seriousness, but is instead the power to make tangible the capricious freedom and charm that animates the moments of sovereign thinking, one not enslaved to necessity. To engage in play, in any meaningful sense, is to rupture the logic of work, not only the immediacy of its demands, but also its deeper inscription within the rational order, where necessity and calculation peg down the subject under the dominion of reason. So a distinction that Bataille is going to be forced to make here is, well, of course there are kinds of play that could also be kinds of work. Or maybe there are forms of play that sit comfortably within the world of work. Are there forms of play that don't absolutely undermine the world of work at all? So just to look ahead a bit, there are going to be forms of play that Bataille sees as not fitting the bill, so to speak. The kind of play that he's talking about, by contrast, is a release, a suspension of utility, an interruption of obligation. And with it comes a shift in affect, a loosening of anxiety, a temporary escape from the fear and subordination that structure the life of the worker, the soldier, or the believer. In play, sovereignty flickers back into view, not as domination, but as a moment of pure expenditure, of presence without purpose. It's also important to see here that, well, if you've read Homo Faber and Huizinga's work, Bataille's not simply trying to repeat his claims, but he's trying to expand on them here. Huizinga identifies play as the defining feature of culture, the basis upon which civilization itself unfolds. The way that Bataille is pushing things further here is that he suggests that what we call play extends, in some ways, beyond the human sphere. It has a connection with animals and the cosmos. And we might say it appears in the very movements and phenomenon all across the cosmos itself. But we'll have to sort of whittle down to those distinctions as we move forward. Now, maybe you remember the challenge that I put forward at the beginning of this talk, which was, can we talk about the economy in terms of notions of pure expenditure? The economy in terms of ways that invite play back into the economic milieu, while at the same time fending off the exchangist mode of profit and production and what have you that we see in capitalist society today? Well, one of the dominant figures that Bataille works with in his work is Marcel Mauss and the concept of the gift. And in this particular essay, Bataille highlights the presence of play in the dynamics of potlatch ceremonies held by indigenous tribes of British Columbia. All across Bataille's work, we see the concept of potlatch, and it is central to his understanding of the notion of nonproductive expenditure, the idea that it is the expenditure of surplus without utility, not accumulation or exchange or profit that underwrites social relations at their most intense. And so in this context, Bataille draws attention to the ludic or playful character of the potlatch ceremony. It's not merely a ritual, but it is a sacred contest, a game of excess. And one of the principal functions of the potlatch, as Bataille sees it, is to stave off the collapse of indigenous social life into forms of economic exchangism that would tear at its cultural fabric. Bataille writes, quote, The underlying principle is gift giving, wealth and gifts flow into the potlatch site. They are like stakes in a game, but stakes sacrificed from the outset in a series of potlatches given or returned the way one might give or return a dinner invitation. Wealth circulates according to rules. The game is to give back at the next potlatch more than one had received, to humiliate a rival by lavish ostentation, by unsurpassable generosity. It is not about enriching oneself, but rather by way of gifts, increasing one's honor and prestige, and the noble standing of one's household. What potlatch offers that an exchangist economy cannot is the possibility of splendor through destruction rather than through accumulation or conservation. For example, surpluses of foods, goods, or stock might be burned, scattered, or otherwise wasted in a ritual. In some cases, human property, such as slaves, could be traded or ritually given to others as a gesture of prestige. And in the most extreme cases, as recorded in ethnographic accounts, the killing of slaves was practiced as a form of sovereign expenditure, a tragic, sacred gesture meant to display the host's unassailable power. So one might ask, is that the kind of world that Bataille is agitating for? I don't think so. But what he is pointing out is that the forms of exchangism and productivism that have bubbled up in modernity in the form of capitalism and state capitalism and Stalin's communism, for example, have ultimately blinkered themselves to the possibility that the kind of play that we see in something like a potlatch produces and its effect on establishing and generating cultural effects. Now, a little bit more on play itself. One of the more intriguing aspects of Bataille's metaphysics, especially at its most granular level, is his observation that the impulse to play allows us to wriggle free from the subject-object distinction imposed by the logic of work. So in situations where we are compelled to work, whether it means producing a specific item or generating a stream of products for profit, we must constrain ourselves to a fixed notion of the object, delimiting it according to its intended function or exchange value. And so to play with an object, by contrast, is to engage with it sovereignly. Consider in its simplest form how a child acts in a sovereign manner when they take an empty cardboard tube from a toilet paper or paper towel roll and transform it into a flute, a spyglass, a scepter, transporting themselves into an imaginal world with their paper toy. The object is liberated from its purpose. It becomes a vehicle for excess, creativity, and pleasure for them. And then we can extend this logic to more sophisticated acts such as détournement. Pardon my terrible French pronunciation, but this is a concept that we saw with the situationist, the strategic recontextualization or repurposing of cultural symbols, political propaganda, and commodities in order to undermine their intended meaning. This too, I would argue, is a form of play, a sovereign reassertion or freedom over objects and signs that once demanded our obedience to them. For Bataille, the act of extricating oneself from the objectivity of the object, of refusing its assigned purpose, can be found in more dramatic contexts as well. He offers the example of Aztec elites giving away their slaves. Even the sovereign, he argues, the one who commands others to work, is bound by the logic of utility through the objectification of the slave. To own is to already be attached, and to be attached is to be subordinated. Bataille writes, quote, the person who accepts the purpose of an object that he possesses recognizes in that object that which subordinates him, himself, to that purpose. Almost as soon as it begins, his attachment to the object subordinates him, himself, its owner, to that object. Bataille writes, quote, the person who accepts the purpose of an object that he possesses specific end. So far, as he is attached to the role, the slave owner alienates part of his sovereignty. And maybe just as an aside to that, when I did my interview with Claire Colebrook on Acid Horizon, one of the things that she had put forward as a strength in the work of Deleuze and Guattari is that it gives us the tools to interrogate our attachments to the world. I think similarly here, the concept of sovereignty, especially in relation to gift giving, is a way in which those attachments to the things in the world of work, in the logic of work, are troubled. And so to create a new politics and an economics that's emancipatory, it should be one that deeply interrogates those attachments at some level and creates practices in which we become absolved ourselves of the attachment to certain objects that we have claimed ownership over. For Bataille, it's in acts of ritual sacrifice, or in giving away slaves in the case of the Aztecs. But we can think of this in terms of other kinds of giving, that a more luminous and complete sense of sovereignty might be realized. It's through these acts of excess and renunciation that the sovereign recovers their ability to exist outside the order of ends, no longer tethered to usefulness, accumulation, or domination. And this is why Bataille places such an emphasis on things like generosity, not simply as a moral virtue, but as a sovereign expenditure. So, for example, in a world dominated by imperialism and uneven development, he provocatively suggests that wealthy nations and superpowers should engage in acts of sacrifice, offering their surpluses to developing nations in a grand gesture of global splendor. Not for justice or guilt per se, but to transcend the restrictive logic of utility and reassert the ecstatic, tragic dimension of life. Now, let's talk about war. Bataille, as a left-wing thinker, is perhaps a little bit unique in terms of his view of war. Fundamentally, he maintains no moral objection to war in the abstract, as he sees in it a form of play. War is an agon. It's a kind of contest that escalates the stakes of life and death. And it's on this note that we could even say that class war or class struggle falls into this category. The emancipation of certain forms of life, in fact, depends upon an engagement in a kind of war. However, for Bataille, most of the ways in which war has played out in modern times has been a degraded form of war. Even though war retains some of the elements of play, such as strategy, rivalry, and rules, in the modern era, war has been ultimately degraded and modified because it's motivated by profit, hatred, racism, or submitting populations to conditions where survival is nearly impossible, rather than as the undertaking of the kinds of risks that would enhance the sovereignty of humanity as a whole. For Bataille, ancient or sacrificial warfare may have reflected a kind of sovereign play. But with the advent of industrial technologies, war has turned its participants into instruments of national rivalries and the pawns of profiteers. Soldiers are often compelled to die without their choosing, whether that means being conscripted by national armies or being lured into war under false pretenses or with empty prospects on the other side of the carnage. For Bataille, this form of compulsion ruins the sacred aspect of play that is familiar to war. Wars that are driven by ideology or economic coercion do not offer the prospect of sovereignty and destroy the lives of people, young people particularly, through the most crass and brutal forms of violence. Having lived through both World War I and World War II, Bataille developed a repulsion to modern combat as it was driven by the form of necessity that he angled himself against in his own work time and again. The true play of combat for him involves exponents who enter into combat willingly, both knowing the risks and the outcomes, and are willing to embrace the utterly tragic dimension of the arena while the prospect of glory remains open to the victor and without profit for either side. There's a film that I consider utterly fantastic, and it's from 1992. It's called A Midnight Clear. Have you seen it? It stars Ethan Hawke and Gary Sinise and follows a small U.S. Army reconnaissance squad deployed in the Ardennes Forest during the winter of 1944. The unit consists of six young soldiers, all selected for their intelligence and unique abilities, and they are tasked with establishing an observation post near the German border. What unfolds is not your typical war film. Instead of emphasizing combat, A Midnight Clear draws attention to the fragile humanity that emerges in the midst of war. The American soldiers encounter a group of Germans whose behavior challenges their expectations of the enemy, opening up a brief but profound space of mutual recognition. What I find fascinating and what I think resonates so strongly with Bataille's work in this particular film is how the young men on both sides, despite being divided by uniforms and flags, share a solidarity in their suffering. Their quiet refusal of the logic of war becomes a fleeting line of flight, and acted through gestures that resemble a kind of play. Moments of absurdity, risk, and imaginative escape. In that suspended space outside the machinery of violence, something like sovereignty briefly returns. And I won't give away much more of the film or the ending, but I think the film is deeply worth watching, and if you do watch it, consider this essay. Before we reach the homestretch, if you are listening to this and you are not already a patron of Left Hand, please drop down into the show notes and find the link to my Patreon account where you can subscribe to receive these episodes earlier. And down the line as Left Hand develops further, there may be more perks to come. But please support my work. And speaking of work, let's talk about Bataille's refusal of work and his thoughts about thinking. So on the question of the refusal of work, Bataille makes a subtle but important distinction. The revolutionary worker does not always reject work outright. Rather, they refuse to work for someone, specifically for the profit of an individual who would exploit them. What truly matters for Bataille is the elimination of compulsion, not just in labor, but in every domain of human activity, including play and consumption. And this is where things become especially interesting for me, because for Bataille, the very conception of compulsion, of being forced, corrupts not only labor but the possibility of genuine play. He writes that those who become slaves, those who relinquish the effervescence and ecstatic expenditure of life for the sake of its preservation, they may still play, but their play might be pathetic. It is reduced to a hollow simulation of freedom, accorded to the sovereign at play. And nowhere is this clearer than in the case of war. Soldiers may be compelled into battle by seduction, by national pride, or by conscription, but war, in Bataille's view, remains a form of play, an agon. It is a contest, but it is a degraded form of play, because it's motivated by profit, sustained by hatred, and animated by an image of the other, with a big O, we might say, constructed precisely so that they can be destroyed. We might ask, then, how far can this analysis be extended to more innocent forms of contemporary play? What of professional sports or the algorithmically intensified combat that we see on social media from time to time, spaces where opposition is manufactured, where play is commodified, and where compulsions are built into the structure of attention itself? And had Bataille lived to see the era of social media, I'm sure he would have something to say on the matter. But Bataille's point, I think, cuts deeper than the critique of exploitation. The sovereign of past revolutions derived their power by turning their subjects into playthings, means to affirm their own glory. But true sovereignty requires more. It demands that the sovereign themselves remain at the threshold of life and death. Sovereignty is not comfort. It is exposure to catastrophe. It is the willingness to be annihilated. The slave, by contrast, gives up this exposure. They renounce their sovereignty. They surrender their right to play without limits. In return, they gain life. But a life lived under the shadow of another's dominion. So now on to thought, philosophy, riddles, and the sovereign form of thought. At the end of this extended meditation—that is, this essay—Bataille reiterates his most radical thesis, one grounded in what he sees as the most damning evidence of modernity, that humanity exists only to play, but has given itself entirely over to what he calls the seriousness of work. The world wars, industrialized slaughter, and the daily history of domination all seem to bear this out for him. Humanity, instead of living sovereignly, wastefully, joyously, dangerously, has chosen subordination. And perhaps the reason lies in a trait that separates us from other animals—the consciousness of our impending death, our inevitable misery. That awareness stirs a deep fear within us, a fear that pushes us not towards freedom, but towards servility, towards preservation at all cost—which means, ultimately, towards work. It is this premise that leads us to an even more radical one in Bataille's thinking, both in this essay and beyond—that thought itself, especially philosophy, is not the expression of our sovereignty, but its negation. The enterprise of thinking, rather than liberating us, may function as a kind of internal or internalized labor. And now I'll just do a quick sidebar here. In our Acid Horizon episode with Jason Babak-Mohagig, he brought up this distinction between Deleuze and Bataille. And often, you know, there is a recorded antipathy, I would say, or skepticism that Deleuze maintains about Bataille's work. And Jason brings this up. And one of the reasons that we see in the text is that, well, Deleuze thought that perhaps Bataille's work was a bit too religious and edged on a kind of religious thinking that Deleuze himself disdained. But also here we see an antipathy towards philosophy, whereas Deleuze fully embraces philosophy not only as a concept, but as a discipline and as one of the multifarious expressions of life in its many historical iterations. And here we see Bataille angling himself against philosophy, or at least a certain form of it. Bataille doesn't completely foreclose the question. But for him, reason and systematic thought have almost always acted in the service of something else, something utilitarian. And so in this sense, thought becomes an auxiliary of work, just as work is the enemy of sovereign life. There is no work without thought. But equally, in its dominant mode, there is no thought that isn't already marked by the logic of work, by order, calculation, and consequence. That said, Bataille does entertain the possibility that another kind of thinking might be possible for us moderns, a kind of thought or meditation capable of extricating itself from this subordinating relation to work. One powerful example he gives is that of riddle-solving, especially in the context of ancient sacrificial festivals such as those in the Vedic tradition. These were not idle games. They were deadly serious. And to fail to answer the riddle could mean death. But to participate at all was to engage in a form of thought not governed by mastery, but by mystery, risk, and sacred intensity. And so if we take Bataille seriously here, then perhaps we could count things like, well, I don't know, jokes, poetry, dream work, and even wordplay and other kinds of verbal absurdity among these non-utilitarian forms of thought, modes of thought that do not serve but play. Now, I'll admit, I have some reservations about Bataille's account of philosophy in this essay, but I agree with his suspicion of its imperiousness. Philosophy has long sought to position itself as the arbiter of all thought, as if everything must ultimately pass through its concepts to gain legitimacy. This is where, for example, François Lareuel's critique becomes useful. For Lareuel, philosophy is the capital form of thought, a mode of thinking that extorts conformity from every other—science, art, religion, mysticism—each bent towards its rational predicates. This is why I believe in the power of art, of music, of active imagination as expressions of thought that refuse to be domesticated by philosophy. These are not lesser thoughts. They are sovereign thoughts, forms of knowing that do not rely on philosophy's traditional form of proof, on its mastery, on its domination. And yet, if you are here listening and I'm here speaking, it means that philosophy is still in some way our form of life, or at least part of our form of life. It's the language that we've learned to speak. And so the real question becomes, how do we relate these different forms of thought—philosophical, poetic, imaginal—not in a strict hierarchy, but in a shared tension or a mutual resonance? What kind of thinking becomes possible when no form demands to rule the others? But back to riddles for a moment. Huizinga notes that in ancient Germanic traditions there existed a type of riddle known as—and excuse my pronunciation here—Hals-Ratzl, literally a neck riddle or a capital riddle. In these trials, the stakes were no metaphor. To receive the riddle was to stick one's neck out—quite literally—and risk death if one failed to meet the challenge. These weren't games of wit. They were ritualized confrontations with mortality, where one who posed the question held the power of life and death over the one who answered. Within these riddles, Huizinga suggests, was a kernel of profound wisdom—the very kind of insight that philosophy has historically sought through formal methodology, logic, and abstraction. But Bataille draws attention to something deeper here. In the mystical and sacrificial context where these riddles emerged, the question itself was inseparable from the imminence of death. The riddle wasn't a puzzle to be solved for some later truth. It was an event, a threshold, a moment of sovereignty suspended over the abyss. Philosophy, by contrast, has often tried to evade this threshold, leaning instead on the notion of immortal gods, eternal forms, or the promise of salvation through reason and obedience. Bataille proposes that our attempts to philosophize, especially when they try to guarantee truth, meaning, or transcendence, are not only ironic in light of our inevitable death, but perhaps ultimately in vain. At least they are in vain when compared to the kind of thinking that emerges in play—a thinking that does not flee death but wittingly widens the aperture between life and death, that moves sovereignly and without promise of rescue across that terrifying divide. And this, I think, carries implications well beyond mysticism. For the revolutionary philosopher, the one who thinks with the highest stakes, Bataille's insight is stark. To engage in thought is to risk one's life, to wager one's sovereignty against a world that demands submission, labor, and conformity. Thought, in this register, becomes an act of defiance, not of mastery—a form of play, yes, but one with nothing less than everything on the line. Bataille's experience of war indelibly shaped his understanding of thought and life, and of war itself, not in some sentimental or reductive way, but through the encounter with a world where reason reached its own annihilating climax. The operativity of thought, as he saw it, achieved in its highest articulation in the machinery of mass death, in a system that compelled the young to march towards slaughter under the banners of ideology, efficiency, and national myths. In war, thought did not falter. It succeeded all too well, revealing its capacity to organize horror with surgical precision. And yet, it is precisely because thought has reached this apex, this crisis, at the limits of utility, that it might be possible to reclaim something from the wreckage. For Bataille, the redemption of thought lies in the return to what it once was—a sovereign activity, born not in mastery but in risk, in excess, and in play. And it's at this juncture that Bataille invokes Hegel, who he brings up in this essay quite a bit, but I failed to honor Hegel's legacy throughout this discussion, but we will here. Anyway, it is at this juncture that he invokes Hegel not to confirm the dialectic but to mark a turning point. He suggests that what we require today is not more thought in the service of work, but a sovereign form of thinking, one that thrives in the affordances of play, that embraces its tragic origin, and that dares to think without end or profit. Bataille writes, quote, Thus, far from setting aside for itself the aspect of play, a philosophical world that has taken itself increasingly seriously and combated every value foreign to reason has steered thought, and with it action, into the impasse in which present humanity finds itself. At this point, Hegel's critique comes into play. Without underrating the difficulties of thought, Hegel sought to reduce everything to work. In that sense, he tried to achieve an accord between work and play. It seems to me that Hegel was right about one thing. Play cannot recover a place in thought. And that place has to be a sovereign one, until the possibilities of work are developed to their utmost. In this connection, let us say that at the level of action, of work, wars seem to us, in their way, to have reached those utmost limits. Perhaps there is a mark here of the opportuneness of Huizinga's little book. The thought based upon work and constraint has hit the buffers. It is time that, after having granted such monstrous importance to work and utility in a way that we know only too well, free thought should finally remember that it too began like a game, a tragic game, and that, by forgetting this, the whole of humanity, being, like it, a thing of play, has gained only the forced labor of innumerable dying men and countless soldiers." End quote. And perhaps I'll leave off here with a challenge to Bataille's work. Has the logic of the dominance of work and its achieving its apex in modernity, does it mean that labor has, in fact, played a very important role in the emergence of the consciousness and the realization that play is the essence of humanity? Hmm. Sounds a little bit like a theodicy. Well, we'll leave that for another time. But if you want more of this essay, I would highly suggest picking up George Bataille's Critical Essays II from Segal Press. It's an excellent collection. I blew through it in like three days, and I can imagine that several of the essays that are found in there will become touchstones for future research. In any case, if you appreciate what I have been doing with Left Hand, there are a couple ways to support. Well, first of all, become a patron. Five dollars a month, just five bucks a month, gets you episodes early. In one case, last month or two months ago, I believe I even dropped in a patrons only essay. You can also follow my work on Asset Horizon. The links are below. But if you are listening in May of 2025, one way that you can support me and maybe find something of interest for yourself is to follow the Kickstarter campaign that I will be launching in just a few days for my deck, Vintagia, the aging oracle of psychogeography and creative discovery. Simply put, when I was an undergraduate many, many, many years ago, I studied the aging in two independent studies. And since then, I had wanted to return to it and do something creative with it. So what I did was I took the hexagrams of the aging and I mapped them on to, I guess you would say, a multimodal matrix through which the activity of psychogeography can be practiced. You can also use Vintagia in a very similar manner to Brian Eno's oblique strategies. And I have created multiple prompts for musicians, practitioners of the fine arts, aficionados of active imagination, and for those who keep personal journals. Ultimately, I wanted to create a fun and aesthetic way to enhance creative discovery and intuition into the lives of folks who follow my work. So go ahead to the link below and click on that. And also, if you are listening on the day of the release of this episode, that means you're a patron. Patrons, go ahead and join the Weird Studies Shapers Salon, where I will introduce Vintagia to a large audience which comprises not only the patrons of the Weird Studies podcast, but that of Left Hand and of Acid Horizon. I am grateful to be a guest on their Weirdosphere platform, where I will be presenting the inner workings of Vintagia. So look forward to that. Once again, the links are in the show notes. Okay, take care for now, and we will see everyone back very soon.