Searching for the Politics of the Impossible: Georges Bataille and the Gesture of Literature

Abstract

In this paper we will focus on the project of the politics of the impossible, announced by Georges Bataille in one of his letters. This project presupposes a politics that is, in a productive sense, the conversion of violence into institutions. Turning to experience, Bataille characterizes politics as the domain of a project that leads to its completion. At its end, however, he does not find a synthesis of subject and object, but rather a negation of the project as such. Instead of absolute knowledge, non-knowledge. The project of knowledge is inseparably linked to a sovereign experience, which, however, stands beyond its limits. But this experience keeps returning, and its ignorance by politics ultimately leads to wars, fascism and other forms of catastrophic violence. The politics of the impossible attempts to be a response to this sovereign experience. We will try to show that Bataille saw a certain solution in the gesture of literature. This gesture appears to be crucial to the politics of the impossible. We will therefore try to show what this gesture consists in and what consequences it has for politics.