Among various sacrifices, poetry is the only one whose fire we can maintain, renew.
If I have known how to produce the silence of others within me, I am, myself, Dionysus, I am the crucified. But should I forget my solitude ...
The poet sacrifices, Bataille writes in Inner Experience, but what is it that is sacrificed? A first answer: that of which shthe poet would speak; the world, in its presence, its immediacy. Think of the word silence (this is Bataille's example). The poet celebrates a silence she remembers - a singular silence, which belongs to a particular time and place. But to write of silence is, in one sense, to lose this it; 'the word silence is still a sound ...'
Compare it to a performance of Cage's 4’33". Of course, what Cage gives us is a singular silence, the silence of this auditorium, of this orchestra before this audience? 4’33". is not made of the sound, but of silence; here, silence is another kind of sound; something resounds even when the musicians do not play. Is Cage’s ruse open to the poet? Might one write a poem called Silence and leave the page blank? Or must poetry be made of words?
If the poet cannot do without words, or if words are in some sense important to the poem, then one can only indicate silence by way of words. To invoke the materiality of the word, the heaviness of language, may not be to lament the awkwardness of matter, as Hegel lamented the heavy obscurity of Egyptian statuary, from which form had yet to free itself. True, these are heavy images, but it is the weight of language – its rhythms, its sonorities – which are perhaps the poet’s chance.
For the one Bataille calls a philosopher, this heaviness is an obstacle; classically, the philosopher attempts to leap over the idiom of a natural language in order to write of the thing itself. The philosopher’s doctrine elevates itself above its expression; language is a medium, the tool which subordinates itself to the delivery of the message. Rhythm and sonority – the material of language – are, from this perspective, just so much static and noise. And for the poet? Perhaps it is possible the poet might the poem answer the presence of that silence by deploying the rhythmical and sonorous properties of words. But isn't this, once again, to have lost the silence of which one would write, or at least, to have regained it in a manner which can only disappoint?
What does the poet sacrifice? A second answer: the dream that language would be merely the outward garment of thought. Poetry rebels against the instrumental notion of language, its subordination to the order of signification. Isn't naming – poetic naming itself something more than signification? To indicate, to point - but towards what? To the silence which has already been lost?. But this is still too simple. Rather, to the distance between the immediate and the mediation which appears to occur through language. 'Appears to occur': because it is not clear that silence is mediated when I call it 'silence' - or at least that such mediation is not a loss of that silence, a deafening roar. The word silence is too noisy. But isn't silence, for this reason, Bataille asks, 'the most poetic' of words (16)? ‘Most poetic’ because it reveals both the limits of one conception of language (signification), disclosing what lies, in language, beyond a servile representation of the world. Here, we have passed beyond the question of the ineffable.
The word silence undergoes a kind of slippage. It slips in the sentence. And through that slippage, by means of it, Bataille can attend to the ‘incessant slippage of thought’; this is how, through language, he can attempt ‘the project of abolishing the power of words, hence of project’ (22). The movement of mediation is interrupted. The slippage of the word has released another experience of language and, perhaps, an experience of a thinking which does not mediate or abstract. A strange thought: to open, a sovereign silence by means of poetry ('by means of' ... surely this is wrong).
A sovereign silence? This is no longer silence which awaits mediation through language, nor indeed what is mediated in the word silence. A silence of discourse - or, better, a silencing of what subordinates language to signification, to the articulation of sense. To attain a sovereign silence is to make contact with a reader such that, in that reading, there is a break with the demand which governs signification, that is, the subordination of the world to the demands of the project, to identity, to unity.
Ordinary language, let us say following Bataille, is servile. But then, because the poetry is composed of the same words as ordinary language (even if signification is suspended), it cannot help but fall back into the regime of sense. The poem can appear to be an edifying work. Can the Bataillean poet - the one who struggles towards a sovereign silence and whose poetry might be said, for this reason, to be itself sovereign - avoid this fate? But the Bataillean poem is made of words; even if it does more than signify, it also signifies; it signifies nonetheless and therefore must bear the risk of falling back into servility. This means the sacrifice of discourse in the poem is never pure; it cannot happen once and for all. It is necessary to begin and rebegin - to read, to write over and again ...
Sacrifice, sovereignty, the disobedient. Perhaps this is a struggle which occurs ceaselessly, at the edges of sense. A secret battle which reveals itself only for those who cave hears to hear what presents itself even as it disappears (presents itself in disappearance, as what withdraws, as an indication) in the rhythms and sonorities of our words, in laughter and tears?
It is not a question of severing ordinary language from poetic language, because this is already to forget laughter and tears. Might one hear a sovereign silence in a kind of irony that is quite different to the one Socrates and Kierkegaard employ in order to allow their readers to discover the truth, the hidden truth, by themselves? Imagine, instead, an irony which does not seek to recover truth, a madness by which words dissolve into a laughter which carries them in another direction: the contagious giggling of children, the buffoonery of Dostoevsky's underground man.
And perhaps, too, there is a thinking of sacrifice - no, that is the wrong expression - a sacrificial thinking which attempts to bear within itself the sovereign silence towards which the Bataillean poet struggles. Here, I remember Artaud's early letters to Rivere (I do not have them to hand). One finds in those pages a suffering-thinking, a thinking which is suffered, passively undergone (but the word 'passive' is too simple ...). A thinking which cannot help but sacrifice itself, which is mired in suffering and cannot lift itself from the crucible of the instant.