L'envie de rire

Le coupable — ​“guilty”, as well as ​“cut” or ​“cut­table”, from the French couper — is a self-por­trait of the French writer Georges Bataille.

One could call it a por­trait because, unlike in auto­bi­og­ra­phy, no life sto­ry pre­dat­ing the act of writ­ing unfolds in its pages. The book was penned between Sep­tem­ber 5^th 1939 and Octo­ber 1943. On Sep­tem­ber 1^st, Ger­many had invad­ed Poland, for­mal­ly sig­nal­ing the start of the Sec­ond World War. ​“La date à laque­lle que je com­mence d’écrire (…) n’est pas une coïn­ci­dence.”, writes the author. ​“Je com­mence en rai­son des événe­ments, mais ce n’est pas pour en par­ler.” In it, the author inscribes not so much mem­o­ries, but rather thoughts that pro­cure him in his coun­try­side refuge, hav­ing fled Paris. But these writ­ings do not take the form of a diary or an epis­to­lary nov­el: any nar­ra­tive or chrono­log­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity is dis­re­gard­ed in favor of a col­lage-like assem­bly of themes, with mys­ti­cal reflec­tions flar­ing up between descrip­tions of his day-to-day — and vice ver­sa —, in an edi­fice not unlike Fer­nan­do Pes­soa’s Livro do desas­sossego (The Book of Dis­qui­et).

Over the course of the text, bat­tles are fought between the sub­ject and lan­guage, as well as between the lim­its — in the sense of extremes, but also regard­ing their edges and lim­i­nal spaces — of both, which blur and lac­er­ate as much as the war­ring world beyond Bataille’s iso­la­tion. Writ­ten while in pro­found soli­tude, we can­not even be sure that Le coupable is tru­ly a book: although lat­er pub­lished, the neg­li­gence in the pro­duc­tion of the man­u­script incurred by Bataille seems to point instead towards a more urgent kind of project, one of more vital impor­tance than sim­ply pro­duc­ing a book, in the most pro­sa­ic mean­ing of the word.

In the words of Denis Hol­lier, Le coupable is ​“simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dis­tract­ed and rig­or­ous tran­scrip­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and recog­ni­tion of what isn’t rec­og­niz­able. The unim­por­tance, the insignif­i­cance of what is rec­og­niz­able. The expe­ri­ence of what’s lost in com­mu­ni­cat­ing”. Bataille him­self — albeit a pro­lif­ic author at that point — admits being fear­ful of the moment in which those lines can be read by some­one who knows him. For those who know Bataille’s remain­ing pro­duc­tion – par­tic­u­lar­ly the works of fic­tion –, that fear of let­ting one­self be rec­og­nized as a sub­ject in such com­par­a­tive­ly pro­sa­ic lines of text seems, at first sight, laugh­able. But the writ­ing con­tained in this book is per­haps espe­cial­ly diaphanous, on account of show­ing no will­ing­ness what­so­ev­er towards inter­act­ing with the styl­is­tic or for­mal tropes from fic­tion or essay. Thus, per­haps, it points direct­ly towards the sub­ject that wrote it.

Through­out the text — naked­ly per­son­al and writ­ten under such ter­ri­bly dif­fi­cult con­di­tions; this is a ​“book vio­lent­ly dom­i­nat­ed by tears (…), vio­lent­ly dom­i­nat­ed by death” — runs a ques­tion­ing and somber under­cur­rent. Bataille, how­ev­er, does not forego laugh­ter. ​“Rire de l’univers libérait ma vie. J’échappe à la pesan­teur en riant. Je me refuse à la tra­duc­tion int­electuelle de ce rire: l’esclavage recom­mencerait à par­tir de là”. Laugh­ter is, in fact, priv­i­leged, even in a ter­ri­ble time in the course of the author’s life as well as the world’s. Every­thing else is ques­tioned and peered — and Bataille is naught but a ques­tion­ing being: ​“Le développe­ment ultime de la con­nais­sance est celui de la mise en ques­tion“.

Laugh­ter, how­ev­er, stands alone beyond the lim­its of this fun­da­men­tal ques­tion­ing act. And it is, indeed, a dif­fi­cult philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion, laugh­ter. Few tried to inter­ro­gate it, and for good mea­sure: accord­ing to Adri­ana Cavarero (in For More than One Voice: toward a phi­los­o­phy of vocal expres­sion), Phi­los­o­phy har­bors the affin­i­ty towards ​“an abstract and incor­po­re­al uni­ver­sal­i­ty, and by the domin­ion of a Word that does not leave any throat made of flesh.” Laugh­ter, being itself a vocal emis­sion that, by def­i­n­i­tion, escapes seman­tic artic­u­la­tion, imme­di­ate­ly affirms the sin­gu­lar­i­ty of the voice — of a voice, in a spe­cif­ic body, like the con­tents of Le coupable seem to point direct­ly towards the inner­most of its author.

Because it escapes lan­guage, and because it leans on an embod­ied acoustic sig­nal, we can eas­i­ly trace a line between laugh­ter and music. From the age-old melis­mat­ic enun­ci­a­tion (orna­men­tal, in oral music, then made struc­tur­al, in writ­ten music) up to the more recent frag­men­ta­tion of text in its pho­net­ic com­po­nents, vocal music — from our tra­di­tion or oth­er­wise — has always thrived on the insur­rec­tion of the voice against its seem­ing­ly nat­ur­al con­di­tion as the remain­der or neu­tral car­ri­er of speech. The ide­al voice of song thus acts ​“not so much as a means of oral com­mu­ni­ca­tion and trans­mis­sion, but as the reg­is­ter of an econ­o­my of impuls­es con­nect­ed to the rhythm of the body, desta­bi­liz­ing the ratio­nal reg­is­ter in which the sys­tem of speech depends” (Cavarero).

A batail­lian vocal and musi­cal expres­sion would then be one where the sen­sa­tion of body sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly per­vades the lin­guis­tic (in its broad­est mean­ing: the sig­ni­fy­ing struc­ture, the sym­bol­ic, writ­ing, the prac­tice of cul­tur­al codes of genre or style), open­ing up spaces for the artic­u­la­tion of ephemer­al struc­tures that are not (con­ven­tion­al­ly) signifying.