Cory Austin Knudson

on translating Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille’s “La Scissiparité” is a hybrid text written during the composition of, and likely at least at first in conjunction with, his novel L’Abbé C. Like L’Abbé C, “La Scissiparité” focuses on three characters: a male libertine (“the author”), a female libertine (“Mme E…”), and a priest (“Monsignor”). All three are curiously multiplex, however, with each seeming to undergo the very scissiparity announced in the title as the text unfolds. The author questions the stability of his identity before a mirror flooded with dazzling sunlight early in the poem, for example. Then, Mme E… attests to “the painful and yet luxuriant feeling of watching it all fall apart,” referring as much to herself as to her circumstances. Finally, the mysterious Monsignor whom the pair are traveling to Rome in order to meet is referred to as “Alpha” and “Beta” by turns in order to “distinguish the look-alikes issuing from a split” — a split, that is, in the Monsignor’s very being, which mirrors the scissiparous identities of the other two characters. During the period in which he wrote “La Scissiparité,” Bataille was particularly preoccupied with the frightful symmetry of apparent opposites such as good and evil, taboo and transgression, attraction and disgust, and the sacred and the accursed. He attempted to both theorize and artistically represent phenomena in which these contrarieties seemed to coalesce and thus fracture distinctions so seemingly fundamental to traditional categories of thought, experience, and aesthetics. “Scissiparity” can be seen as an attempt to both portray and enact this process of scissiparity, as it were, rendering the experience of transgressing the parallel limits between self/non-self, arousal/repulsion, laughter/horror, and sense/nonsense in a frenzy of jagged imagery and at times deliberately incomprehensible language. Thus, though the multiplicity of possible meanings that permeate the text must be necessarily and sometimes violently narrowed through every act of translation, “La Scissiparité” challenges its translator to maintain at least some semblance of the radical indeterminacy of its expression. It is, like so much of Bataille’s work, an outgrowth of the thinker’s militancy against the “mathematical frock-coat” of idealism and rationalism — understood as the presumption of a one-to-one correspondence between thought and experience, or between language and reality — here rendered as a purposeful derangement of both semiotic and psychic identity, a cancerous multiplication of meaning beyond the bounds of any attempt to fully grasp it.