The aporias of matter: Bataille’s subjective stain and/at the origin of Zizek’s materialism (original) (raw)

The notion of the stain is central to the works of both Georges Bataille and Slavoj Žižek, especially in their respective conceptions of material reality and the subject’s place within it. Bataille’s anti-idealist conception of matter (which he calls base materialism) construes it as something essentially exterior to language and human thought, as an exteriority, which shatters the subject’s presumed mastery or knowledge of the world. For Žižek, following Lacan, the stain or blind spot indicates an empty space in the fabric of reality, the so-called Real, which, like Bataille’s base matter, resists conceptualization. For both Žižek and Bataille, theses aporetic stains, however, are necessary for the subject and knowledge to come into being in the first place. Those familiar with the two thinkers will be surprised by how rarely Žižek mentions Bataille, despite a significant overlap in their intellectual outlook and objects of study. Not only did Bataille directly influence Žižek’s “mentor”, Lacan, but his writings also resonate with many of the basic concerns of Žižek’s own work. On the rare occasions that Žižek does mention Bataille, he brands him ‘irrelevant’ and ‘pre-modern’, and refuses to engage seriously with his work. This essay will draw some parallels between Žižek and Bataille’s respective conceptions of aporetic materialism – the notion that our knowledge of matter is always structured around a central impossibility, or void –, in order to examine whether this easy dismissal and general neglect is, in fact, a symptom of the unavowed presence of Bataille’s thought as a blind spot, a stain, at the centre of Žižek’s work.