10 September: Wollstonecraft's death, Bataille's birth and the argument about limits
Mary Wollstonecraft died on this date in 1797, eleven days after giving birth. Georges Bataille was born on it a century later, and Paul Virilio died on it in 2018. Three lives with almost nothing in common, and one shared preoccupation: where the line is drawn, and who draws it.
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797 · Wikimedia Commons
Mary Wollstonecraft died on 10 September 1797, aged thirty-eight, in a rented house in Somers Town. Georges Bataille was born on the same date a hundred years later, in Billom in the Puy-de-Dôme. Paul Virilio died on it in 2018, in Paris, at eighty-six. Anniversary coincidences are usually worth what you pay for them.
This one repays a second look. Wollstonecraft argued that the limits imposed on women were manufactured rather than discovered, and that a creature kept from education and then blamed for ignorance had been set up. Bataille held that the limits reason draws around experience are real, that crossing them on purpose is among the oldest human activities, and that an account of society leaving out the desire to squander is an account of something else. Virilio argued that speed sets a limit on politics, deliberation taking time a system running in real time does not have. A fourth item belongs here with a caveat: Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique portatif was burned in Geneva in the late summer of 1764, but not on this day.
Wollstonecraft's case rested on an experiment nobody had run#
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared in January 1792, dedicated, a little optimistically, to Talleyrand, whose report on national education would have schooled French girls only to eight. Her argument is usually called a demand for equality; it is better described as a challenge to the evidence. Grant everything said of the women of her acquaintance — frivolous, cunning, incapable of sustained reasoning — then consider that they have been fed on novels since infancy, taught accomplishment instead of argument, and given a prospect that depends on being found pleasing. The alleged inferiority is a result reported without its method.
Her target is Rousseau, whose Sophie in Émile was built to be everything Émile was not. Against him she sets a claim with a political sting in the tail: virtue is the same for both sexes or it is not virtue, and a creature capable of virtue is owed the conditions in which it can be exercised. That means an education and, more cautiously than her admirers remember, a place in civil society. "I do not wish them to have power over men," she wrote, "but over themselves" — a line quoted so often it has gone smooth, and in context a piece of strategy.
The death was ordinary and preventable. Her daughter was born late on 30 August 1797. The placenta did not come away; a physician was fetched after two in the morning and removed it in pieces, with considerable loss of blood. Fever followed. Godwin's account records the doctors forbidding her to nurse the child and arranging for puppies to draw off the milk, a detail odd enough that it is worth confirming it is in the record. She died eleven days later. The child was Mary Shelley, whose .
Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy
He published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in January 1798, four months later. The author of Political Justice held sincerity to be a duty rather than a taste, and wrote about his wife as he would have written about anyone: the affair with Gilbert Imlay, the daughter born outside marriage, two suicide attempts, her feelings for Fuseli, the particulars of the deathbed. His publisher urged him to cut. He refused, then revised for a second edition that August, by which time it hardly mattered.
What followed was not a reaction against her ideas but a reaction against her, which proved far more effective. The Anti-Jacobin Review in July 1798 called her a concubine and a kept mistress, and remarked that the biographer need not have listed every amour, since two or three instances decide a character as well as a thousand. Richard Polwhele's verse satire The Unsex'd Females appeared the same year. Her sisters, who ran a school, lost pupils. Southey accused Godwin of a want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked.
The damage lasted the better part of a century, by a mechanism worth naming. The Vindication did not have to be answered because it could no longer be cited: any writer who invoked it invited the reply that its author had lived in a way no respectable person could defend. An argument about education was disposed of by an argument about a private life. Recovery came slowly, with the suffrage campaign. Charles Kegan Paul published the letters to Imlay in 1879; Elizabeth Robins Pennell wrote the first full-length biography in the 1880s; Millicent Garrett Fawcett introduced the centenary edition of the Vindication in 1892 and claimed her as foremother of the campaign for the vote. Virginia Woolf, in The Common Reader in 1932, put it best: "One form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living."
The Memoirs wrecked her and are also why we know her; almost everything intimate in the record passes through Godwin's candour, and scholars who deplore what he did work from the book that did it.
Bataille worked in a library and wrote about what economies cannot spend#
He trained as an archivist at the École des Chartes, qualifying in 1922, and spent most of his working life on the staff of the Bibliothèque nationale. The theorist of expenditure held down a cataloguing job for thirty years, which is either an irony or the whole point, given his insistence that transgression needs a prohibition.
His collective ventures mostly failed. He edited Documents from 1929 to 1930, a journal of ethnography, art criticism and deliberate category error, and founded Acéphale, a review and secret society running from 1936 to 1939 under André Masson's headless man. With Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris he ran the College of Sociology from 1937 to 1939, lecturing on the sacred while the sacred was being mobilised across the Rhine to purposes he detested. Critique, founded in 1946, outlived him.
He quarrelled with almost everyone. Breton attacked him in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism in December 1929; Bataille joined the counter-pamphlet Un Cadavre the following January, with Leiris, Queneau and Prévert, crowning Breton the Pope of Surrealism. Sartre reviewed L'Expérience intérieure (Gallimard, March 1943) in Les Cahiers du Sud as "Un nouveau mystique", arguing that Bataille could not use rational discourse to establish the authority of an experience defined as exceeding reason. It is a good objection. Bataille's answer, appended to Sur Nietzsche in 1945, was that the instability of his terms was the subject rather than a defect of the writing: a reply, not a refutation.
La Part maudite came from Minuit in 1949, subtitled an essay in general economy. Its move is to begin from surplus rather than scarcity. Solar energy arrives without return, societies grow until they cannot absorb more, and the excess has to go somewhere: into festivals, monuments, art, luxury, or the potlatch of the Pacific Northwest, where status accrues to whoever destroys most. Otherwise it is discharged catastrophically, through crisis, armament and war; he read the Marshall Plan, then a year old, as a rare case of a state grasping the point. The anthropology has been much revised since and no economist has taken the book for economics, but its question survives. A system organised wholly around accumulation has no theory of what to do with what it cannot use.
L'Érotisme followed in 1957, opening with a formula Bataille at once warns is not a definition: "Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death." Beneath it lies the limit thesis: taboo and transgression are a pair, each producing the other, and the sacred appears at the line between them. His fiction, beginning with the pornographic Histoire de l'œil in 1928 under a pseudonym, belongs to the argument rather than sitting in embarrassment beside it; readers who want the theory without the pornography are asking for a Bataille who does not exist.
Critique gave him its memorial double issue, numbers 195 to 196, in 1963, carrying Blanchot, Barthes on Histoire de l'œil and Foucault's "Préface à la transgression", where the postwar theory of the limit begins. Derrida took up the general economy in "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve" (1967), and Baudrillard's symbolic exchange is Bataille's expenditure with the sociology changed. He died on 9 July 1962, so this date is his beginning only.
Virilio's claim was that the accident is delivered with the machine#
Born in Paris on 4 January 1932, he spent the war as a child in bombed Nantes, and it never left the work. He trained in stained glass, worked with Matisse on church windows, heard Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne, served in Algeria, and came to theory through architecture. Bunker Archéologie, in 1975, grew out of years photographing the remains of the Atlantic Wall: fortification studied at the moment fortification stopped working. Vitesse et politique, in 1977, named the discipline. Dromology is the study of speed as a political category; states organise circulation, and whoever moves fastest governs.
His most quoted sentence is also his most compressed argument, from Politics of the Very Worst, the Semiotext(e) interview volume of 1999:
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
Nobody disputes that technologies are dangerous. Virilio's claim goes further: the accident is a property of the object rather than a misfortune befalling a neutral one, shipped in the same crate, and therefore something a society could inventory in advance. He wanted a museum of accidents and got close in Ce qui arrive, made for the Fondation Cartier. The integral accident was his name for the version that arrives when systems are globally coupled.
Sceptics were not short of material. He generalised freely, preferred the aphorism to the citation, and the charge of technological determinism was often made and not unfairly, since the machines in his account act while the people react. What survives is the argument about tempo: deliberation requires an interval in which a claim can be checked and a decision reversed, and systems answering in real time do not shorten that interval so much as abolish it. What he would have made of synthetic media is not mine to invent, but his framework yields a prediction on its own. If the accident is invented with the machine, the accident proper to a generative model is the plausible falsehood, produced correctly and distributed at network speed. The handbook literature on philosophy of technology has caught up with him since his death.
Voltaire's burning, in the right month and the wrong week#
The Dictionnaire philosophique portatif was printed clandestinely by Gabriel Grasset in Geneva in the summer of 1764, with London on the title page and no author's name on it. Voltaire disowned it with relish, attributing it to a society of men of letters. The Geneva authorities had it torn up and burned in front of the town hall on 24 September 1764, not on 10 September; the earlier date could not be confirmed from any source worth citing. The Paris Parlement condemned it on 19 March 1765, and on 1 July 1766 a copy belonging to the Chevalier de La Barre was burned at Abbeville with its nineteen-year-old owner, convicted of blasphemy.
This item resists the thread, and it is better to say so. Nobody mistook this limit for nature; the Council of Geneva knew it was drawing a line and drew it. It also failed comprehensively. The condemnations advertised the book, the printer went unpunished thanks to a protector on the Council, and the Dictionnaire ran through edition after edition while its author denied writing it from a safe distance. The one death in the story is La Barre's, which is not funny.
Four limits, then, of four kinds: one enforced by custom and dressed as biology, one intrinsic to experience and sought out on purpose, one produced by the machinery of circulation, one imposed by a magistrate and easily evaded. Forcing them into a single thing would be the tidiness Bataille spent forty years attacking. What they share is smaller. In each case somebody had an interest in the line passing for a fact of nature, and in each case it was not.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
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