georges bataille

The more I think about my life, the more of a loser I realize I am. There might be a tinge of regret of not making different decisions, of ultimately taking the safe path in life. But we’re told that regrets are for losers. (Things are getting quite circular here.) Nevertheless the inner gothpunkrebel of my teenage years would spit on my face now seeing how ultimately petit-bourgeois I have become.

Reading Rob Doyle’s biofiction Threshold from 2020 was a slap in the face. It is parts autobiography, philosophy, travel chronicles, drug stories and a catalog of self-disgust. It is all things that are in my wheel house which made me really enjoy it. But as immersed as I was reading his fictionalized (?) adventures through Europe, Southeast Asia, India in various stages of sobriety and debauchery, I always wondered what would have happened if I said fuck you to the States in my 20s and went to Europe, if I actively lived the life of an artist/writer/performer that I always imagined I would be. Well, you see what sewage spiral this sent me down.

The values I lived by stemmed in part from the conviction, attained at the age of sixteen and never really discarded, that work, as it was generally experienced by people of my own working-class background — i.e. dreary toil that you didn’t really believe in — was to be avoided as far as possible. (118)

My ethos was never as strong as my desire for comforts in life. What the fuck is the use of ethos when you’re trying to scrape by trying to survive on the streets? At the same time, who the fuck are you if you keep selling yourself out? This is the internal struggle I’ve dealt with ever since I left home for college at 18 in 1997. And while I’ve dipped my toes in debauchery, there was never a point I was lost in it where I couldn’t come back to safety.

I’m not saying that if I made different decisions that I would be a successful writer/artist/performer — actually I’m really implying that I would probably died on the streets had I done so. But who knows?

Later in this passage on page 118 as he describes his early-life gravitation to Georges Bataille and how Bataille justified it all: [Bataille] argued that human beings had lost themselves in the work-world, rendering themselves means rather than ends. The systems of rationality and order we had erected to protect us from the dangers of nature had grown too rigid and powerful: they now enslaved rather than served us. (118)

Amen.

Of course the 313 pages aren’t all focused on Bataille and hedonism — this was just the part that got me thinking the most. But there are quite a bit of psychedelics and sex, two of my favorite things in life that I don’t think I’ve indulged in enough. Boredom and death. Humor and thought. At documenta, an art festival that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, he writes: but this institutional yoking of art to political engagement seemed symptomatic of a broader cultural synergy: everywhere you looked, art was becoming indistinguishable from social work, progressive politics, liberal guilt. (154) The deeper we get into the quagmire that is the 2024 US presidential election, the more I feel this.

I bought my copy via Thriftbooks, and a “withdrawn” hardback copy from the Appleton, WI Public Library came to me. When you open the cover, the word “WITHDRAWN” in all caps is stamped on the page. It made me wonder why. The book was in perfect condition, so was it withdrawn because no one checked it out? That’s a very depressing thought since I really liked this book. Was it withdrawn because of the subject matter? I know how precious people are about words other people read, so maybe that was it? If so, it’s a little more thrilling. Again, at documenta: …yet the earnest patter that followed about human rights, democracy and the struggle for justice has me siding with the tyrants and the conflagrationists. Besides, censoring authors gave them the prestige of rock gods. When a book was deemed heretical enough to immolate… it gained the impregnable glamour of revolt and edginess (though perhaps this did not apply to Winnie-the-Pooh (152.)

So maybe this is the case and Rob Doyle is now a rock star? At least he can be in Appleton, WI?

Meanwhile I’ll go back to work.