A semantics of love: Brief notes on desire and recognition in Georges Bataille

Abstract

According to the Hegelian scheme re-proposed by Honneth, the first pattern of intersubjective recognition, still below the juridical mediation, is the sphere of interactions marked by affective bonds, or love. It is considered a first stage mostly because recognition is rooted in the partners' mutual dependency as needy creatures, which demand care and the emotional approval that follows it. In this sense, a constitutional lacking emerges as the fundamental character of the most primitive kinds of interaction embedded in social norms. And that is important inasmuch the other stages of recognitive practices depend on this first one, in which subjects acquire capacities for rational and moral reasoning and action in the public sphere. However, one could question to what extent the same normative structure can be taking as underlying every loving relationship, as oriented by an affirmation of the subject's independence, while presupposing involuntary feelings of liking and attraction. After all, if the aspirations of reciprocal recognition in this realm are intrinsically related to very concrete features, why taking child caring, friendship and sexual encounter as referred to the same set of recognition patterns? If Honneth's recourse to psychoanalytic theory makes it clear why in all these kinds of interaction is to be found erotic contents of libidinal character, on the other hand one gets no clue on why the very different forms of satisfaction of the drives do not come into consideration. At this point it seems important to recall Georges Bataille's account of sexuality to think not only about the limits of recognition, but also its dialectical structure. The central notion of transgression helps understand why the normative grounds of intersubjective acknowledgment regarding at least some love relationships require a sort of suspension which is not the mere suppression of their validity: the violence that resides at the core of such erotic, transgressive experiences points to a disruptive effect over the features of subjective arrangement, intersubjectively formed. That is why excitement and fear, pleasure and anguish intertwine in eroticism, and desire becomes the name of a fascinating and frightening ontological excess. It is this very paradoxical character that is decisive for Bataille, for if norms need their transgression in order to exert a subjective inscription, one should not take the passage from desire to recognition as just a progressive process towards a determined form of sociality. Bataille associates a certain Durkheimian heritage with a philosophy of life to account for a libidinal economy of recognition in which desire lies at its very core. This paper proposes a reflection on what is at stake in this conceptual operation, and on the significance of the peculiar enjoyment of norms to a rethinking of the particular aspirations of recognition in love relationships.