Sobre a questão da Aufhebung: Baudelaire, Bataille e Sartre

Abstract

This essay looks at Sartre’s rather nasty 1943 essay on Bataille, “Un nouveau mystique” and the further argument between the two writers on Baudelaire. Sartre accuses Bataille, in the latter’s Inner Experience, of introducing the “transcendent into the immanent;” of externalizing the ego such that human responsibility is elided; of leading, with its fascination with ritual, sacrifice and community, to totalitarianism; of swallowing up history. Sartre uses Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung from the Phenomenology as the focus of his critique: Bataille, Sartre argues, removes synthesis from Hegel’s trinity of thesis/antithesis/synthesis (Aufhebung) and puts tragedy in the place of the dialectic. This argument about the role of Aufhebung and the dialectic thus raises all the issues fundamental to what was to be called postmodernism: the role and sovereignty of subjectivity, the possibility of the sacred, the use of language, human freedom, the role of history in textual production, the individual as against the community, and the reasons for rejecting the possibility of a transcendental.

Keywords

• Jean Paul Sartre
• Georges Bataille
• dialectic
• totalitarianism
• postmodernism
• transcendence