The Poetics of Expenditure Author(s): Susan Blood Source: MLN, Vol. 117, No. 4, French Issue (Sep.

, 2002), pp. 836-857 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251920 Accessed: 18/02/2010 15:58
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The Poetics of Expenditure

Susan Blood

The development of aesthetic modernism in France, both in the field of painting and in literature, has been deeply influenced by postKantian modes of thought. To speak very generally, post-Kantian thought affirms the "purity"and specificity of aesthetic endeavor. The story of modernism in this context becomes a story of how art purified itself of external influences and began to explore the possibilities of its own medium. Modern art no longer serves religion or the state and ceases to be of economic benefit to the individual who produces it. These are some of the tenets of post-Kantian modernism, and the latter point in particular has figured crucially in the discussion of French poetry and its development since Baudelaire. The fact that poetry does not pay is a point of honor for poets like Mallarme and Valery, and not only because an unpaid poet stands on high moral grounds. If pure poetry excludes economic values, this is also due to the nature of poetic language. Mallarme commented famously that most language usage amounts to nothing more than putting a piece of money silently in some one else's hand (368). Language as coinage is a mere means to an end; it enables the conduct of business within the social sphere and its meanings are conventionally determined. Pure poetry, on the other hand, has none of these economic characteristics. It is not a simple medium of everyday communication and its value cannot be measured in economic terms. Kant used the expression "purposiveness without purpose" to describe this aesthetic resistance to economic ends. The most succinct attempt to critique the post-Kantian inheritance

MLN117 (2002): 836-857 ? 2002 by TheJohns Hopkins University Press

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in France is probablyJacques Derrida's essay "Economimesis."' It is a classic deconstructive exercise, set up as a reading of Kant's Critique of Judgmentand focusing on the particular paragraphs in which Derrida discerns a theory of mimesis in the making (2 ?43-51). The fundamental oppositions in Kant's aesthetic thought-between art and nature, the liberal and the mercenary arts, the fine arts and the sciences-are explicated and shown to be unstable. This general deconstructive project underwrites the term Derrida coins in the essay's title, "Economimesis." Economimesis reflects an alignment of two realms which the Kantian system attempts to hold apart: "Itwould and oikonomia could have nothing to do with one appear that mimesis another. The point is to demonstrate the contrary, to exhibit the systematic link between the two" (3-4). In Derrida's reading, the concept of economy remains indeterminate. He claims that he is not seeking to establish a link between mimesis and any given political economy: "[Mimesis] can accommodate itself to political systems that are different, even opposed to one another" (4). Nevertheless, the concept of economy in its most general instance entails a kind of specification. The attempt to trace the general occurrence of "political economy" in Kant's aesthetics thus reveals the occult presence of a particular political economy: "A politics, therefore, although it never occupies the center of the stage, acts upon this discourse. It ought to be possible to read it. A politics and a political economy, to be sure, are implicated in every discourse on art and on the beautiful. But how does one discern the most pointed specificity of such an implication?" (4, my emphasis).' Derrida's search for the political economy implied by Kant's aesthetics is conducted on several fronts, but my discussion will focus on one series of observations. While the Critiqueof Judgmentleaves politics in the wings, so to speak ("it never occupies the center of the stage"), a political figure does appear, strangely disguised, in Kant's
'The essay appears in French in Mimesis des articulations.Richard Klein's English translation is in Diacritics11. 3 (1981): 3-25. I will quote from Klein's translation here. 'The above citation is deceptively simple. By stating that a political economy is implied in all aesthetic discourse, Derrida is making a general proposition. He is interested in discerning "la specificite la plus aigue d'une telle implication" (the most pointed specificity of such an implication), i.e. specificity conceived as a general category of thought. To emphasis the issue, I have altered Klein's translation somewhat. Klein uses "politics"and "political economy" as purely general terms, while the original French is more specific: "une politique et une 6conomie politique."

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discourse. This is the Prussian king, Frederick the Great. In keeping Kant does not with the professedly apolitical character of the Critique, Frederick as a king. Frederick is an exemplary personage, but present Kant finds him particularly admirable for his poetic talents and not for his political skills. Kant cites few poets in the Critique, but Frederick comes in for special praise and attention. Of course critics have attributed this to Kant's servility and possible lack of taste in the matter of poetry. There seems to be no other explanation for his putting a king in the place of a poet and thereby betraying his own aesthetic agenda: only a traitor to the doctrine of aesthetic freedom would bend his knee to a king at the moment when he wishes to pay homage to the sovereignty of genius (Frederick appears in the section that Kant devotes to "The faculties of the mind which of the Critique constitute genius"). As compromising as Kant's behavior may appear, Derrida decides not to dismiss it entirely. The figurative economy in which a king could be exchanged for a poet is not without interest. Such an economy, Derrida argues, involves more than the simple transaction suggested by mere servility on Kant's part. The king-poet exchange becomes, in fact, the crucial moment through which Derrida will begin to trace the processes of "economimesis" in Kant's aesthetics. In order to follow the argument, we should look more closely at the passage in Kant's Critiquewhere this figurative economy is set in motion. In "The faculties of the mind which constitute genius," Kant claims that genius is distinguished by the ability to produce "aesthetic ideas." An aesthetic idea is one that exceeds the finite character of rational ideas. Rational ideas need to be precise and are governed by a strict relationship between words and what they represent. In this sense, rational ideas involve simple transactions; they are useful as currency in everyday exchange. Aesthetic ideas, however, cannot be confined within the rational economy of give and take because they engender an excess of thought: "byan aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e. concept,being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible" (175-76, original emphasis). The excess of thought in this instance is produced by a defect or lack of adequation between language and what it is supposed to represent. Excessive thought and defective representation go hand in hand. In order to illustrate this definition of an aesthetic idea, Kant turns

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to a poem by Frederick the Great. In the stanza that interests Kant, Frederick exhorts himself to die peacefullyjust as the sun sets in quiet splendor. The setting sun is thus called upon to represent "the rational idea of a cosmopolitan sentiment even at the close of life" (178): Oui, finissons sans trouble et mourons sans regret, En laissant l'univers comble de nos bienfaits. Ainsi l'astre dujour au bout de sa carriere, Repand sur l'horizon une douce lumiere, Et les derniers rayons qu'il darde dans les airs Sont les derniers soupirs qu'il donne a l'univers. [Yes, let us finish without disquiet and die without regret Leaving the universe overflowing with our benefactions. Thus the star of day at the end of its career, Spreads over the horizon a soft light, And the last rays that it shoots in the air Are the last sighs that it gives to the universe.]3 Kant argues that by annexing the image of the setting sun to a rational idea (the cosmopolitan sentiment of a dying king), Frederick creates an aesthetic idea "which stirs up a crowd of sensations and secondary representations for which no expression can be found" (178). The Sun-King is a rich figure precisely because the image is not adequate to the idea and leaves so much unexpressed. Kant's reading of the poem is at this point in conformity with his general discussion of the imperfect excess of the aesthetic idea. But his reading goes beyond the general argument as he casts a critical gaze on the image itself. In the process, he appropriates the image of the sun so that it becomes crucial, not only to Frederick's poem, but to his own aesthetic discourse. Kant's critique and appropriation of the image occur in an awkward sentence where he describes the imaginative activity behind Frederick's poem: as the imagination annexes sun to king it simultaneously "remember[s] all the pleasures of a fair summer's day that is over and gone-a memory of which pleasures is suggested by a serene evening" (178).4 The awkwardness of this

3This is Klein's translation of the poem. 4The German here reads: "in der Erinnerung an alle Annehmlichkeiten eines vollbrachten schonen Sommertages, die uns ein heiterer Abend ins Gemut ruft." Kritik derUrteilskraft, hrsg. von Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1957), 252. J.H. Bernard's translation is somewhat clearer than Meredith's: "in remembering all the pleasures of a beautiful summer day that are recalled at its close by a serene evening." New York: Hafner Press, 1951) 159.

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sentence (exacerbated by the English translation, but already present in the German) comes from the fact that even before the image of the setting sun is annexed to the idea of the dying king, that image itself is strangely complex. The setting sun is both an immediate experience and a memory. The experience of the serene evening is not self-contained; it suggests or remembers "all the pleasures of a fair summer's day" that it literally puts an end to. There is thus a stark difference between what the setting sun remembers and what it is, what it signifies and what it performs. But this is the very difference that gives the image its aesthetic quality, enabling it to suggest the excess of thought that sets off the figurative economy of Kant's discourse. If the image of the setting sun somehow suggests both more and less than the idea of a dying king, this inadequacy of is with respect representation already an inadequacy of self-presentation to the image itself. Thus Kant's sun becomes a privileged image, prompting Derrida to describe his poetics (along with those of Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, and possibly Bataille) as a "helio-poetics."5 The complex economy that Kant attributes to the Sun-King of Frederick's poem is the same economy that Derrida attributes to the King-Poet of Kant's discourse. A chain of associations thereby unfolds linking sun, king, poetic genius (and Frederick and Kant) in an infinite figural process. The process is infinite because, while each term may suggest the other, no term is fully adequate to the other. The quickening of thought set off by these associations is never shut down by a completed mental transaction. Critics have commented on the fact that Kant himself seems to rise to the level of poetry in his discussion of Frederick's poem, perhaps bringing the third Critique itself into the economy of aesthetic ideas. Richard Klein writes in this vein that Kant's page devoted to Frederick is "luminous," "the most aesthetic, poetic, the sunniest, happiest page in the whole flinty volume."6 Such luminosity indicates that we are here at the heart of Kant's aesthetics, at the moment when his discourse no longer merely describes the aesthetic in a constative fashion, but performs it by producing an excess of thought.
5For a discussion of the sun as a figure in Bataille's thought, see Martin Jay, "The Disenchantment of the Eye: Bataille and the Surrealists," in Downcast Eyes: The French Thought (Berkeley: U of California P, Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century 1993), 223-28. Jay emphasizes that it was Bataille's engagement with the work of Van Gogh that led him to make "connections between looking at the sun, self-destruction, and aesthetic creativity most explicit" (224). This nexus of associations is already working in Kant, as Derrida's argument makes clear. 6 Cf. "Kant'sSunshine." Klein's essay is a commentary on "Economimesis".

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One might object to this lyrical assessment that the chain of associations Kant's discourse sets in motion is somewhat cliched. The Sun-King-Poet-Philosopher is a familiar figure, rather Apollonian in character. Of course, nothing prevents a cliche from having an infinite potential for expansion. Whether the cliche's expansion engenders an excess of thought, however, is unlikely.7The question to be asked here is whether Kant discourse remains within an Apollonian cliche of beauty, or whether it moves beyond the clich6 into another realm. Since I am using a Nietzchean vocabulary, the question could be rephrased in terms of the Apollonian/Dionysian opposition: is there a Dionysian element in Kant's helio-poetics, an element that might preserve the infinite, aesthetic character of the Sun-King-PoetPhilosopher chain of associations, preventing the chain from entering the order of rational ideas? Does "Kant's Sunshine" (to steal Klein's title) have a dark shadow? My answer to the question is "yes." The Sun-King of Kant's discourse differs from the cliche in an important aspect: Kant's sun is a settingsun, his king is a dyingking, the image of "solar majesty"that he presents in the Critiqueis one whose excessive power is made apparent at the moment of self-extinction. This is very different from the Sun-King image projected by Louis XIV, for example, who invests his subjects with privileges while exacting submission in exchange: Versailles would be the symbol of such a rational economy of power. But the image of power in Kant plays for higher aesthetic stakes, producing not a palace but poetry. The palace may be beautiful, but it does not attain to the infinite aesthetic status of poetry because it is ultimately too useful:"in architecture the chief point is a certain useof the artistic object to which, as the condition, the aesthetic ideas are limited" (186; 2 ?51, original emphasis). The production of poetry involves a more sublime economy of power because the power is based upon a sacrifice of self. The self-sacrificing Sun-King-Poet, exacting nothing in return, leaves the universe "overflowing"with his benefactions. In this particular instance, the dying Frederick bequeathes to Kant the gift of poetry. This is what Derrida means by "economimesis," since Kant is thus in a position not only to receive

71 am speaking here of the cliche as it is exchanged in prosaic discourse. Certain authors, like Baudelaire and Flaubert, have delighted in extracting a high aesthetic charge from cliches, but this requires a particular disposition of thought. Such a disposition may well be part of the Kantian influence on late nineteenth-century French aesthetics.

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from Frederick, but to emulate him. Kant becomes a poet as he identifies with Frederick's gesture of sublime self-sacrifice. This is very unlike the relationship that critics are inclined to imagine between an egotistical king and a self-serving philosopher whose exchanges would involve the trading of flattery and favors. If Kant and Frederick have gained something from mutual commerce, it is the attribute of Poet. While this may flatter both of them, poetry is a gain that exacts a loss. The specific political economy that accompanies Kant's heliopoetics can thus be seen as a form of enlightened despotism. In such an economy the King may patronize the Poet, but the production of poetry need not thereby be viewed as a mercenary activity. When paying the Poet, the King does not render fee for service; instead he gives without counting in a gesture that imitates the free production of poetry. By the same token we could say that the Poet in writing poetry imitates the King's largesse-with this kind of self-sacrificing expenditure it becomes difficult to say who is imitating whom. For this reason it is not accurate to assert that Kant's helio-poetics is grounded in the patronage system-when we cannot separate poetry from payment then we cannot say that one term is more fundamental than the other. The example of Frederick the Great serves to underscore this ambiguity since he appears, not as the King who pays Poets, but as the King-Poet. It is not clear in Kant's exposition whether Frederick is first a King and then a Poet, or vice versa. His two attributes illuminate one another in an infinite process which never finds a conceptual ground. This is in keeping with Kant's definition of poetic inspecificity. Thus, while Derrida's reading of Kant moves awayfrom the traditional exclusion of economic values, it does not simply demystify the sacred aura with which Kant surrounded poetry. Instead, the reading suggests a way in which economic considerations might participate in the process of sacralization: the chain of analogies that link King, Poet, Sun, Genius (and Derrida adds God to Kant's list) is held together by the idea of sacrificial expenditure (sacrifice, in its etymological sense, implying the production of sacred things).8 The emphasis on analogy in Derrida's essay is worth noting.
8 This is a point Bataille makes in the "Notion of Expenditure". My citations are taken from (Euvres completes I (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 302-20. Translations are my own. For a complete English translation of the essay, see Allan Stoekl's volume, Visions of Excess(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985), 116-29.

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("Analogy is the rule," 13) While Kant sees analogy, or the unfolding of "kindred representations," as a poetic attribute, Derrida adds economic implications to the idea. This is possible precisely because the poetic analogy between things does not yield a concept of those things; poetic analogy is infinite, which is another way of saying that it does not find its end in a concept. It establishes formal, not conceptual, relationships between things. So we must conclude that form is not a static notion for Kant-form is what enables us to relate an infinite number of things. This particular notion of form can also be understood in economic terms, as a function of exchange-when commodities are exchanged for one another, or for money, this is because the items exchanged are formally comparable, and not because they relate to one another conceptually. For Marx, money itself is a form, the "universal equivalent form" through which we relate the most disparate of commodities-corn, linen, tea, iron, gold, etc.'' Derrida does not say this explicitly, but he does use poetic analogy and economic exchange interchangeably in his reading of Kant. The two are at work in what he calls the sacred commerce between God, Poet, King, etc. The "alternative Kantianism" that Derrida elaborates in "Economimesis" harkens back in many respects to the work of Georges Bataille. The attempt to read Kant's aesthetics in terms of an economics is completely in the spirit of Bataille, who wanted to generalize the notion of economy to include economically "irrational" phenomena like works of art and the impulses that produce them. Bataille's notion of general economics, which Derrida repeatedly invokes, underwrites his deconstruction of categorical oppositions in traditional Kantianism. Art and nature, for example, may be opposed to one another in a restricted notion of economics where art is useless and nature useful; in the conceptual framework of general economics, however, art and nature exchange places and imitate one another. The process of generalized exchange or analogy that Derrida calls economimesis exceeds the distinction between uselessness and usefulness. Not that exchange value has eliminated use value; it has simply displaced it in a general economics.'0 Furthermore, I will argue that Bataille's notion of sacrificial expenditure is at the heart of
9 See Capital,vol. 1, pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 3 D: "The Money Form." ,0For a more extensive discussion of the relationship between Bataille's general economics and Derrida's deconstructive project see "De l'6conomie restreinte a 1'economie g6nerale" in Derrida's LEcritureet la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967).

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the "sacred commerce" that defines Kant's aesthetics for Derrida. Bataille's general economics involves the contention that economies should be evaluated in terms of the way they waste-modes of unproductive expenditure, which Bataille calls dipense, are more crucial to the structure of economies than the utilitarian phenomena that economists normally study. Bataille's depense not profane, petty is waste but waste taken to such an excess that it acquires a sacred status. The exemplary instance of this kind of expenditure is sacrifice as it is practiced in pre-bourgeois societies or in societies that have retained their "archaic" character."l While Derrida does not emphasize the point, the commerce that links Sun, King and Poet in Kant's aesthetics is sacred because it involves self-sacrifice (perhaps the type of sacrifice that defines enlightened despotism as a political economy). I propose to consider two of Bataille's essays which show an "alternative Kantianism" at work in the articulation of what Bataille occasionally calls "the poetics of expenditure." The purpose of my analysis is not simply to confirm Derrida's critique of Kant, but to suggest an approach to the reading of canonical modernist texts which would benefit from that critique. The two essays in question are "La Notion de depense," which dates from 1933, and "Baudelaire," which first appeared in Critiquein 1947. While the essays are apparently unrelated, they represent the extended elaboration of a poetics in which Baudelaire, named or unnamed, occupies a privileged position. In this respect, Bataille's poetics is consistent with the modernist tradition that places Baudelaire at its fountainhead. Bataille differs from the tradition, however, by seeing economic issues at stake in modernism's debt to Baudelaire. "La Notion de depense" might have been subtitled "Beyond the Utility Principle," since the essay examines economic practices that cannot be explained by any kind of usefulness. These include religious sacrifices, competitive sports and the extravagant rituals (particularly betting) that surround them, the purchase ofjewels, and the production of works of art. Such practices, according to Bataille, exhibit the Kantian purposiveness without purpose-they carry their end in themselves and serve no utilitarian function. In the case of the arts, Bataille divides them into two categories-those, like architecture, that require real expenditure, and those, like literature, that "provoke anguish and horror by the symbolic representation of tragic
" "Archaic" is the term that Bataille uses in "La Notion de depense" to describe social structures that are not determined by capital in one or another of its forms.

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loss (degradation or death)" (307). So literature involves symbolic rather than real expenditure. This should give literature an inferior status in Bataille's aesthetics-if literary expenditure is symbolic it may very well not be expenditure at all. Interestingly, Bataille does not examine the consequences of the aesthetic hierarchy he has begun to articulate. The distinction between real and symbolic expenditure no longer functions when Bataille turns his attention to the question of poetry. Like Kant, Bataille places poetry at the top of the aesthetic hierarchy: "the termpoetry,"he writes, "[. . .] may be considered in with expenditure: fact it signifies, in the most synonymous creation by means of loss. Its meaning is thus close to that precise way, of sacrifice"(my emphasis, original emphasis). Bataille goes on to say that only "an extremely rare residue" of what we call poetry is actually poetry. For those rare individuals who have poetry at their disposal "poetic expenditure ceases to be symbolic in its consequences: to some extent, the person who takes on the function of representation places his very life at risk." The poet is given over to "the most disappointing forms of activity,to poverty, to despair, to the pursuit of shadows without substance that yield nothing but vertigo or rage" (307). The possibility that literary expenditure might be merely symbolic is avoided with poetry which Bataille considers to be the purest form of expenditure, "synonymous with expenditure" itself. Bataille here takes the Kantian consecration of the poet, based on the notion of sacrificial expenditure, and emphasizes its dark side. Like Kant's Sun-King-Poet who gives off light while sinking into shadow, Bataille's poet is caught in a paradoxical function-the function of representation places life at risk, poetic mimesis is a deadly game. Although Bataille does not mention Baudelaire in the 1933 essay, it is clear from his later piece that he must have been thinking of Baudelaire in his early definition of the poet. According to Bataille, Baudelaire's poetic vocation cost him everything, including life and the power of speech. The poetic consecration is also a curse, an idea that Baudelaire himself advocated in the opening l poem of Les Fleursdu mal.

12 The beginning of Benediction depicts the mother's curse on her infant: "Lorsque, par un decret des puissances supremes, / Le Poete apparait en ce monde ennuye, / Sa mere epouvantee et pleine de blasphemes / Crispe ses poings vers Dieu, qui la prend en pitie." [When, by a decree of the supreme powers, / The Poet appears in this jaded world, / His horrified mother, filled with blasphemies / Shakes her fists at God, who takes pity on her.] I have examined this topic more thoroughly in "Modernity'sCurse."

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This negative version of Kant is, in one respect at least, more Kantian than Kant. In Kant's aesthetics, mimesis or imitation is treated with caution. If an artist merely imitates nature or another artist, the result may be a mechanical work and not a work of fine art. Aesthetic models must be used "not for imitation, but for following. The possibility of this is difficult to explain" (? 47, original emphasis). Derrida's concept of economimesis is designed in part to explain this mimesis that isn't one. In Bataille's aesthetics, mimesis is even more threatening since it has the potential to make a mockery of the poet's sacrifice. While poetry may be a mimetic or representational art, Bataille must argue that poetry worthy of the name does not merely simulate sacrificial expenditure. Bataille's poet, then, must suffer real losses, ones that may not be compensated for. There is actually a resistance in his thinking to economimesis, i.e. to the process that compensates the poet in Kant's aesthetic system. This should come as something of a surprise, since Derrida draws heavily on Bataille to articulate the concept of economimesis. We might therefore speculate that the resistance to mimesis marks a moment of tension within Bataille's thought. While I do not pretend to have exhausted the possible implications of such a tension, the rest of my paper will explore the thesis that Bataille's resistance to mimesis is related to an unthought contradiction in his theory of general economics. On the one hand, general economics is supposed to account for a wider range of phenomena than classical economics; on the other hand, general economics is meant to function as a radical critique of capitalism and the logic of capital. In other words, Bataille's economics is both a general theory and a situated praxis. AsJean-Joseph Goux has argued, this leaves general economics in a peculiar relationship to capitalism: general economics must both account for capitalism and supplant it. In Goux's view the theoretical project falls short because Bataille cannot account for expenditure as it takes place in a capitalist economy.13 My thesis is that Bataille recoils from the mimetic potential of capital, i.e. the potential of capitalist investment to simulatesacrificial expenditure. In the larger frame, the risk is that capitalism might simulate general economics, thereby destroying the latter's radical, critical potential. Bataille's piece on Baudelaire was written fourteen years after the

'3See "General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism" in YaleFrench Studies 78 (1990), On Bataille,Allan Stoekl ed.

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essay on expenditure.14 While the pretext was a review of Sartre's preface to Baudelaire's journals, Bataille's intent was also to develop his earlier sketch of the problem of poetry. In fact, Bataille called the Baudelaire piece a "defense of poetry." Sartre made such an epithet natural by attacking the idea of the accursed poet that Bataille associated with the definition of true poetry. For Sartre, Baudelaire's claim to be under a curse because he served the cause of poetry could not be taken seriously. If Baudelaire's life was a sacrifice, Sartre considered it an imitation sacrifice, one which was fed by Baudelaire's fundamental bad faith. By interpreting Sartre's argument as an attack, not on Baudelaire the man, but on poetry, Bataille was laying his cards on the table-true poetry, whatever else one might say about it, is not mimetic. While such a notion of poetry may be "betrayed by the poem, it is not betrayed by the poet's unlivable life. In the last analysis, only the poet's long agony rigorously guarantees the authenticity of poetry [. . .]" (54). What Bataille means by "the poet's long agony" is the fact that Baudelaire contracted syphilis and eventually lost the power of speech. (There is the famous episode of Nadar's last visit to Baudelaire-the photographer provoked his friend with the question "How can you possibly believe in God?" and Baudelaire could only reply by gesturing at the setting sun and uttering the sound "Cr6nom"). This latter point is crucial to Bataille's poeticsBaudelaire's poetic vocation (and herein lies the curse) actually put his ability to use language at risk. For Bataille, this loss of linguistic ability guarantees Baudelaire's authenticity more than any poem in LesFleurs du Mal. The poems in and of themselves stand as a betrayal of poetry. It is only when they are taken together that they put themselves at risk and attain their true poetic stature. For this reason, Bataille never cites any of Les Fleursdu Mal in his analysis. The only piece of poetry he cites is part of a popular song that fascinated Baudelaire, who wanted to incorporate it into a melodrama that he never wrote. The song is called "Les Scieurs de long," and it runs as follows: Rien n'est aussi-z-aimable
Franfru-Cancru-Lon-La-Lahira

Rien n'est aussi-z-aimable

Que le scieur de long.

14 See "Baudelaire" in La Littrature et le mnal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 37-68. Translations are my owin.

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Chante Sirene Chante Franfru-Cancru-Lon-La-Lahira Chante Sirene Chante T'as raison de chanter. Car t'as la mer a boire, Franfru-Cancru-Lon-La-Lahira Car t'as la mer a boire, Et ma mie a manger!" [Nothing is as lovable as the Sawyer. Sing, Siren, sing! You have reason to sing. Because you have the sea to drink and my sweetheart to eat.] Baudelaire saw a potential melodrama in this song-he imagined that there was a stanza missing in which the sawyer, who must be have drunk, drowns his wife. This would explain the final lines-you to eat-and would enable the sea to drink and my sweetheart Baudelaire to appropriate the popular song to himself. A drunken Vin man who kills his wife is the theme of one of his early poems-Le de l'assassin (The Wine of the assassin). Apparently Baudelaire was frequently asked to recite this poem in public, making it a kind of signature piece. Bataille argues that the drunken murderer and his degenerate language stand as a mask for the poet and poetry. The murderer does not imitate the poet, however ("Franfru-Cancru-LonLa-Lahira" hardly resembles the refrain of any of Les Fleurs du Mal); instead the murderer "is charged with the sins of the author" (57). The relationship between murderer and poet is therefore one of a murderer takes the place of the poet non-mimetic substitution-the without resembling him, is sacrificed in his place as the scapegoat for his sins. Bataille does not develop the consequences of his argument with great systematicity. If the sacrificial substitution works, for example, why is it that the poet must undergo the same fate as the scapegoat? Why must the poet, in the end, come to imitate the drunken sawyer and his linguistic degeneration? If the structure of sacrifice is designed to resist mimesis, how do we explain the recurrence of mimesis here? Might Bataille be recoiling from what could be called a general (rather than a restricted) economy of sacrifice, in which loss and expenditure cannot be separated from a movement of compensation? Instead of addressing these questions, Bataille devotes the closing pages of the Baudelaire essay to a portrait of nineteenth-century capitalism. In essence, Bataille argues that capitalist societies are completely antithetical to archaic economies in which sacrifice plays

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an explicit role. While such an antithesis may seem natural, it actually runs counter to the goal of a general economics which would account for all socio-economic structures in terms of sacrificial expenditure. The tension that Goux found marking Bataille's thought most notably in La Part mauditeis present here as well. In this instance, it is Bataille's incorporation of one of Baudelaire's reflections that leads to a "restricted"definition of capitalism. The reflection comes from a journal entry in which Baudelaire emphasizes the antithetical relationship between work and pleasure: "Achaque minutes nous sommes 6crases par l'idee et la sensation du temps. Et il n'y a que deux moyens pour 6chapper a ce cauchemar,-pour l'oublier: le Plaisir et le Travail.Le Plaisir nous use. Le Travailnous fortifie. Choisissons" (1: 669). For Bataille, the choice that Baudelaire lays out is fundamentally an economic one: "The choice always bears upon the vulgar, material question: 'given my present resources, ought I to spend them or to increase them?"' (60). This is not merely a choice that individuals must make. Bataille argues that the same alternative weighs upon societies and determines their economic structure. Saving and spending, as Baudelaire suggested, both involve a relationship to time: the individual or the society that saves is oriented towards the future, the one that spends is primarily concerned with the present moment. By definition, Bataille claims, societies have a future orientation'5-"but," he adds, "[they] cannot deny the present and so leave to it an indeterminate portion. This portion belongs to the festivals, which culminate in sacrifice. Sacrifice serves the interests of the present moment by expending resources that concern for the next day would have conserved" (62). Curiously, while Bataille claims that the conflict between saving and spending, future and present, secular and sacred, characterizes all societies-"they cannot deny the present"-his portrait of capitalist society is one in which all conflict has been eliminated. Capitalist society has chosen the future once and for all, effectively denying the present. If we are to believe Bataille here, expenditure has no place in capitalism. A capitalist economy is based upon sheer, endless accumulation. Baudelaire's historical significance lies in his resistance to the capitalist ideology of
15 His argument is that societies function to compensate individuals for their weaknesses. Individuals form societies because they are looking towards some future benefit. Of course this idea of society could be contested-Rousseau's SecondDiscourse and Social Contract would be good places to start.

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accumulation, a resistance more radical than the Romantic reaction which Bataille argues can be reconciled with that ideology. This argument, which closes the essay on Baudelaire, is peculiar in several respects. Clearly, Bataille's portrait of capitalism is a distorted one. The idea of endless accumulation without expenditure has an hallucinatory aspect-it recalls the figure of the miser more than that of the capitalist. (Interestingly, there are moments in Baudelaire's poetry that evoke a similar image of hallucinatory accumulation-the poem titled Spleenthat begins with the line "J'aiplus de souvenirs que sij'avais mille ans," for example.) What Bataille seems to resist is the fact that the logic of capital is not based upon a reified opposition between accumulation and expenditure-instead, capital accumulates through This may be counterintuitive, but it follows expenditure. the dynamic of Bataille's notion of the general economy which involves the lifting and realignment of conceptual oppositions. In Marx's analysis of the transformation of money into capital, the function of expenditure is primary-money that is not spent will never become capital.'6 Of course, the logic of capital turns expenditure into an imitation sacrifice, since money is invested only to return to the investor. Bataille's resistance to this logic once again reveals his uneasiness at the possibility that sacrifice might be simulated. As a reading of Baudelaire, Bataille's analysis similarly poses problems. Baudelaire's relation to the logic of capital is not so thoroughly agonistic. In his "Conseils aux jeunes litterateurs," Baudelaire explicitly calls poetry an investment: "Lapoesie est un des arts qui rapportent le plus; mais c'est une espece de placement dont on ne touche que tard les interets,-en revanche tres gros" (2:18). In "Conseils auxjeunes litt6rateurs" Baudelaire also argues that there is no substance to the idea that poets are cursed and bound to lose everything: "C'est pourquoi il n'y a pas de guignon. Si vous avez du guignon, c'est qu'il vous manque quelque chose" (2:14). One could dismiss these comments as insubstantial, since they were made in 1846 when Baudelaire was only twenty-five years old and retained some youthful optimism. Later essays, particularly the ones devoted

6 Bataille himself in "The Notion of Expenditure" argues for the primacy of expenditure-in primitive economies as the institution of potlatch, and in modern commerce as well. He criticizes classical economic theory for tracing the origins of commercial exchange to the positive need to acquire goods. Exchange, he argues, originates in the "contrary need for destruction and loss," i.e. in the need for expenditure. See 308-09.

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to Edgar Allen Poe, advance the idea of the curse on poets with real conviction. But there are other aspects of Baudelaire's poetics that cannot be dismissed so lightly. One is his theory of universal analogy, or correspondances, which is often considered to be the crux of his poetics. It is interesting that Bataille never mentions this theory in his "defense of poetry." The theory would be one way of connecting Baudelaire to Kant, who similarly defined poetry in terms of the also production of analogy. Correspondances involve a poetic sacrifice of "the practical order of things," as Bataille describes such sacrifice in "The Notion of Expenditure": "[poetic sacrifice] does not involve the real loss of animal or human life but a represented loss brought about by associations of images that destroy the practical order of things. Such an expenditure, it is true, ceases to be purely symbolic in its consequences" (note 11). Baudelaire's poem Correspondances could be read in terms of "associations of images that destroy the easily practical order of things." Why, then, does Bataille neglect to affiliate or correspondances universal analogy with expenditure? My answer should not be surprising. Just as the generalization of analogy in Kant (as Derrida reads him) is fundamentally compensaThese aesthetic systems, tory, so too the poetics of correspondances. with their coordination of loss and compensation, are not so far from the logic of capital as Bataille might wish. If post-Kantian ideas of aesthetic value have traditionally been defined in opposition to economic notions of value, these notions have primarily been understood in terms of use-value. An economy based on use-value is not a capitalist economy. Capitalism privileges exchange-value and money, which Marx understands as the form of exchange. As Derrida demonstrates in "Economimesis," such an economy can be reconciled with an aesthetics of analogy, which understands poetry as the form of exchange of ideas and images. In her essay on Baudelaire's two poems entitled Invitation au voyage(Invitation to travel), Barbara Johnson has juxtaposed passages from Marx's Capitalwith fragments of Baudelaire's poems and statements by Kant and Valery that support the doctrine of Art for Art's sake.l7 The analogies are strikingthe movement of capital becomes infinite since it is not determined by any principle of finite utility, but has its end in itself. Both Kant and Baudelaire present the theory of analogy as infinite for similar
17 du See Defigurations langagepotique (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 132-39. An English translation of the essay exists in The CriticalDifference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1980), 21-51.

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reasons.

I now propose a brief consideration of the poem Correspondances in order to confirm and extend the foregoing observations. La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent. Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, -Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies, Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens, Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens. [Nature is a temple where living pillars Sometimes let out confused words; Man passes there, through forests of symbols That watch him with familiar looks. Like long echos that mingle from afar Into a somber and deep unity, Vast as night and as the light, Perfumes, colors and sounds answer one another. There are perfumes fresh as infant flesh; Sweet as oboes, green as prairies, -And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant, Having the expansion of infinite things, Like ambergris, musk, benjamin and incense, That sing the transports of the mind and senses.] The setting of Baudelaire's poem is intriguing and might have interested Bataille insofar as it appears to offer an archaic representation of reality. To the extent that the poem is situated anywhere, that temple and incense inplace has strong sacred connotations-the voke a world that seems far from the profane places where modern capital accumulates. Paul de Man has argued that the temple setting suggests a kind of antique serenity that affiliates Correspondanceswith the neo-classical poetic movements of the late nineteenth century (253). If we keep Bataille in mind, we might note another connotation of the temple which is not quite so serene: the temple is not only

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an emblem of antique equilibrium, it is also the site of sacrifice. The sacrificial connotations are reinforced by other elements in the poem's first stanza. There is, for example, something uncanny in the way Baudelaire presents the relationship between man and nature. Traditionally, we think of man as the subject in this relationship, as the one who is invested with the powers of vision and understanding, while nature is merely the object of the inquiring human gaze. Here, however, the subject/object relationship appears to be reversed. It is nature that looks on man with familiarity while man remains "confused." The fact that nature here knows more than man is unsettling. In keeping with Bataille's critical approach to Baudelaire, I would argue that man is being presented as a potential victim and that human subjectivity is sacrificed in the temple of nature. The line "L'homme y passe" would support the sacrificial reading if we take the word "passe"to be a synonym of dying. This is not completely farfetched, since Victor Hugo, whom Baudelaire frequently imitates, uses the word in that sense. The exchange between man and nature, in which man loses the characteristics of consciousness while nature acquires them, is also typical of Hugo-it is the structure of what Hugo calls "contemplation." In general, then, one can argue that a sacrificial note is sounded at the outset of Correspondances. This sacrificial note continues in the second stanza, as what Bataille calls "the practical order of things" is lost (and man disappears) in the affirmation of a synesthetic world view. A world in which perfumes, colors, and sounds talk to one another is also a world in which the rational antithesis between night and light no longer functions. The logic of non-contradiction has been sacrificed and night and light are now presented as analogous. Bataille's notion of poetic expenditure is telling here, since it enables us to see synesthesia as entailing a kind of loss. Most critical appraisals of Correspondances focus on the "richness" of aesthetic perception that results from the correspondence of perfumes, colors and sounds. But this sensory wealth accumulates through expenditure, through the "transports of the mind and senses" which lead to the disappearance of "man." The human subject is simultaneously enriched and impoverished. In a similar vein, the intensity of perception that the poem celebrates is founded upon a "tenebreuse et profonde unite" that lies beyond perception. It is thus possible to combine Bataille'stheory of Baudelaire with the traditional reading of Correspondances and to argue that involves both loss and compensation. synesthesia This loss and compensation can be traced in the dominant figure

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of the poem-that of perfume. Perfume undergoes some interesting changes in the last three stanzas. In the second quatrain, "perfume" refers to odors in general, i.e. to objects of everyday perception. It is not fundamentally distinguished from other sensations like colors or sounds. As we move to the tercets, however, "perfume" begins to function differently. No longer just a natural sensation, it becomes the privileged vehicle through which the synesthetic correspondences pass: the feel of infant flesh, the sound of oboes, and the sight of green fields all communicate as "perfumes." To paraphrase Marx on money, these perfumes are forms that represent an exchange-in this case the exchange of natural sensations. There is a loss of natural perception in this movement, a loss that is often tragically marked in other of Baudelaire's poems-in Le Gout du neant, for example, he writes "Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur!" We should note that none of the metaphorical "perfumes" mentioned in the first tercet of Correspondances actually a natural scent. As perfume is becomes a medium of exchange, as scent becomes the generalized form of sensation, it is the natural sense of smell that is placed at risk. This suggests a deeper connection between Baudelaire's sensual and poems, like Correspondances, the melancholic pieces that represent what he called "spleen" and depict an allegorical world beyond or below the world of sensation. Critics have traditionally opposed and his poetics of spleen. Baudelaire's poetics of correspondances Walter Benjamin, for example, sees the two as involving a distinction between sacred and profane experience. In Benjamin's analysis, the loss of sensation described in Le Gout du neant marks an exclusion from sacred experience-the splenetic individual for whom Spring has no scent feels "as though he is dropped from the calendar. The big-city dweller knows this feeling on Sundays" (184-85). In contrast, as Benjamin sees Baudelaire's correspondances an effort to recover from the big-city dweller's loss: they reveal the ritual value of the aesthetic and restore the individual to the sacred calendar (182). I do not want to take issue with Benjamin's reading, but merely to insist of that it shows an interdependency sacred and profane experience in is Baudelaire's poetry. The "sacred" aesthetics of correspondances compensatory: it too is based upon the loss that the profane poems explicitly represent. does not stop with the first tercet, My reading of Correspondances however: the process of abstraction that changes perfume from a natural sensation into a form does not represent its final transmutation. The ambergris, musk, and incense of the poem's final tercet are

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no longer natural sensations, nor are they metaphorical vehicles through which other sensations pass. They are perfumes that have been produced through human labor and their value is one to which a price could be attached in a very literal sense. We could say, then, that the perfumes in this poem have evolved from natural sensations into commodities. These commodities, Baudelaire tells us, have "the expansion of infinite things." Elsewhere he marvels that a grain of incense can fill an entire church.'8 But the property of infinite expansion has another feature, one that has frequently been noted by commentators: the final set of perfumes in Correspondances are into an enumerative series which is infinite in the sense organized that it is potentially open-ended.l' The enumeration of perfumes is initiated by a change in the status of the word "comme" between the first and second tercets-the first "comme" expresses the relationship of analogy between infant flesh and oboes, etc., while the second "comme" merely introduces the final list of perfumes ("like ambergris, musk, benjamin, etc."). The fact that there are four of these perfumes mentioned, while there are only three in the previous stanza, reinforces the thought that a kind of numerical augmentation is taking place. This occurs at the point where the form of exchange or of analogy-the perfume-ceases to be a mere vehicle for metaphorical displacements and becomes an end in itself. In the process, poetic expenditure is compensated by an infinite poetic productivity. In Marxian terms, this last transformation of the perfume corresponds to the transformation of money into capital. The form of exchange (money) becomes an end in itself, and this produces capital. Thus, aesthetic formalism can be seen to dovetail with what could easily be called economic formalism-a reading of capital that would undermine the distinction between use value and exchange value, between necessity and luxury, production and consumption, conservation and expenditure. Bataille's critique of capitalism (as involving the repression of expenditure, luxury, and consumption) could in this way be co-opted for capitalism, and his "general economics," with its lifting of rational distinctions, could be seen as compatible with the

Un fantome II: Le parfium. " Henri Peyre makes this observation in the introduction of his book What is Symbolism? Paul de Man elaborates on it in the article "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric"from TheRhetoric Romanticism(New York: Columbia U P, 1984). of

1,See the poem titled

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irrationality of economic formalism.20 It is this possibility that may have prevented Bataille from engaging in a close reading of Baudelaire's poetry. The production of perfumes in Correspondances, which can be summed up in the equation 3 = 4, nicely describes the economic irrationality of capitalism. If Baudelaire's merit lies in his attitude towards capitalism, this attitude includes a heightened awareness of the latter's irrational potential and a taste for pointing out moments when "two plus two equals three" and "hallucination [. ..] conquers the realm of simple reasoning" (Fusees, OC I: 655).21 By affiliating poetry and expenditure, Bataille's theory underwrites the link between Baudelaire and capitalism that Bataille himself expressly denies. Such a link lays the ground for an extensive reinterpretation of Baudelaire's poetry, a reinterpretation that would emphasize the relationship between figure and number, metaphor and calculation. With my reading of CorrespondancesI hope to have given an indication of the shape such a reinterpretation might take. Not surprisingly, readings like de Man's andJohnson's move in the same direction by showing what de Man calls "the transposition of ecstasy to [. ..] economic codes" (251). In literary historical terms, such readings critique the post-Kantian, modernist tradition with a penetrating edge that has gone largely unnoticed.
The University Albany (SUNY) at

20Jean-JosephGoux makes a similar argument in his essay "General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism." Goux suggests that there are strong analogies between Bataille's "general economics" and supply-side economic theory as it was articulated by George Gilder, Ronald Reagan's favorite author. As capitalism enters its postmodern phase, the similarities become more striking. 21 For a stimulating reading of irrational economic structures in Baudelaire's prose poem Assommonsles pauvres,see Suzanne Roos, "EssayingTheory."

BIBLIOGRAPHY et Bataille, Georges. "Baudelaire." La Litterature le mal. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. 37-68. I. "La Notion de depense." (Euvrescompletes Paris: Gallimard, 1970. 302-20. 1985. "The Notion of Expenditure." Trans. Allan Stoekl. Visions of Excess. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. 116-29. Baudelaire, Charles. (Euvres completes.2 vols. Ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade), 1975-76. Benjamin, Walter. "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. New York: Shocken Books, 1969. 155-200.

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Ed. Patricia Blood, Susan. "Modernity's Curse." Baudelaireand the Poeticsof Modernity. Ward. Nashville: Vanderbilt U P, 2001. 147-56. de Man, Paul. "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric." TheRhetoric Romanticism. of New York: Columbia U P, 1984. 239-62. Paris:Aubier-Flammarion, Derrida,Jacques. "Economimesis."La Mimesisdesarticulations. 1975. 55-95. "Economimesis." Trans. Richard Klein. Diacritics11. 3 (1981): 3-25. "De l'economie restreinte a 1'economie g6nerale: Un hegelianisme sans reserve." L'criture et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Goux, Jean-Joseph. "General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism." Trans. Kathryn Ascheim and Rhonda Garelick. YaleFrenchStudies78 (1990): 206-24. Jay, Martin. "The Disenchantment of the Eye: Bataille and the Surrealists." Downcast French Thought.Berkeley: U of Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century California P, 1993. 223-28. Johnson, Barbara. "Comme dirait l'autre: Deux Invitations au voyage." Defigurationsdu langagepoetique.Paris: Flammarion, 1979. 103-60. "Poetry and Its Double: Two Invitations au voyage."The Critical Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1980. 21-51. Kant, Immanuel. The CritiqueofJudgment.Trans.James Creed Meredith. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952. Trans.J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1951. Critiqueof Judgment. Kritik der Urteilskraft, hrsg. von Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1957. Klein, Richard. "Kant'sSunshine." Diacritics11. 3 (1981): 26-41. Ed. Mallarme, St6phane. "Crise de vers." CEuvres completes. Henri Mondor and G. JeanAubry. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade), 1945. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Marx, Karl. Capital:A Critiqueof Political Economy. Aveling. New York: Modern Library, 1936. Roos, Suzanne. "EssayingTheory." Unpublished essay.