„Merdre!“ or (Im-)Pure Origins Are(n’t) A Riddle. On ‘Scatontology‘ I...

“Beaucoup trop d’emmerdeurs idéalistes!“ Thus Georges Bataille, according to his biographer Michel Surya, is said to have rejected in early 1929 André Breton’s call for a common surrealistic action. Metaphorically, as the expression is used by Sartre (Le sursis) and Beauvoir (Les Mandarins), for instance, “emmerdeur“ means an annoying person or a pain in the neck, at any rate someone who gets on your nerves. More literally (and originally), as the term is employed by Raymond Queneau, a disciple of Kojève’s and editor of the latter’s impactful courses on Hegel as well as founding member of the famous group of ´pataphysical poets in the succession of Alfred Jarry known as Oulipo (Chéne et chien), it is translated more aptly by pain in the ass or stinker, taking into account the etymological fact that the word as such can hardly hide nor properly contain the shit in its inside.

In short: Shitters, that is what they are, the Surrealists around Breton, in Bataille’s view, because they would attempt to deny the only logical consequence of the colossal failure of Hegelianism, i.e. a radical (and in this very sense “low”) materialism, by (re-)embellishing it idealistically by return of post, so to speak. Thus Bataille discredited and disavowed their efforts to achieve, by a despite its being non-dialectic nevertheless self-contradictory and contra-factic way, a nevertheless “high” form of thinking and writing, notwithstanding its alleged novelty character. Against these efforts, Bataille raised the claim (as Breton saw correctly, if with disgust) to expose oneself, both theoretically and practically, to all the shit in the world not only metaphorically, but downright materially, in literary and partly also formal continuity with Jarry’s Ubu Roi and his scandalous word of entry, “Merdre!“: Monsieur Bataille, Breton boasted indignantly in 1930 in his Second Surrealist Manifesto, “fancies flies“, he revels “at night in the filth with which he likes to see himself burdened”, he has set out “to take nothing into account but the lowest, most frustrating, and filthiest that there is in the world”, and he expresses “his complacency in the most lyrical manner by using words such as besmirched, senile, nidorous, inept, imbecile …”.

In my presentation, I shall elaborate on the one hand what is at stake in the said controversy between Breton and Bataille about both the significance and the function of filth, or the scatological, as it were, in thought and writing since Sade, and on the other hand I want to elucidate the poetological pertinence of the latter by discussing literary examples such as Günter Eich’s poem Latrine (1946) with its persiflage on Hölderlin and Austrian writer Werner Kofler’s (d. 2011) infamous motto-like phrase: “Using the same toilet. Using the same words.”