[Translated from the French (pdf). And be forewarned that this version is unfortunately not typeset for mobile, although it should be legible. Please notify me of any grammatical issues.]

ACEPHALE

RELIGION · SOCIOLOGY · PHILOSOPHY · PUBLISHED 4 TIMES A YEAR

1st year I THE SACRED CONSPIRACY June 24, 1936

by George Bataille Pierre Klossowski and Andre Masson

THE SACRED CONSPIRACY

[Or "The sacred conjuration"]

What we have undertaken must not be confused with anything else, cannot be limited to the expression of a thought and even less to what is accurately considered as art.

It is is necessary to produce and to consume: many things are needed that have yet to come about and it is the same for political unrest.

Who thinks, before having struggled until the end to make a place for men, that it is impossible to see them without feeling the need to destroy them? But if nothing can be found beyond the political work, human greed will meet nothing but the void.

WE ARE FERVENTLY RELIGIOUS and, to the extent that our existence is our condemnation of all that is recognized today, it is an internal requirement that we will be equally imperious.

What we undertake is war.

It is time to abandon the civilized world and her light. It is too late to cling to being reasonable and educated —— that has lead to a life without appeal. Secretly or not, it is necessary to become completely different or else cease to be.

The world which we have belonged to will never propose to love outside of each individual insufficiency: its existence is born from its commodity. A world that cannot be loved in death —— in the same way that a man loves a woman —— only represents the interest and the obligation of work. If it is compared with the worlds that have disappeared, it is hideous and is found lacking to them all.

In the disappeared worlds, it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in the world of educated vulgarity. The advantages of civilization are offset by the way by which men profit from it: the current men profit from it by becoming the most degraded of all things that have existed.

Life has always been a tumult without apparent cohesion, but she only finds her grandeur and her reality in ecstasy and ecstatic love. What holds to ignoring or to not knowing ecstasy is an incomplete existence by which thought is reduced to analysis. Existence is not only a restless void it is a dance whose force dances with fanaticism. The thought which does not have as its object a dead fragment, exists internally in the same manner as flames.

One has to become closed and unshaken for the existence of the civilized world to finally appear uncertain. It is useless to respond to those who can believe in the existence of this world and authorize its existence. If they speak, it is possible to see them without hearing them, and even if we look at them, to only "see" what exists far behind them. One has to refuse boredom and only live by what fascinates.

On this path, it would be in vain to be agitated and to try to attract those who have weak desires, such as to pass the time, to laugh or to became individually bizarre. It is necessary to advance without looking behind and without taking into account those who do not have the power to forget the immediate reality.

Human life is tired of serving the head and reason of the universe. To the extent that it becomes that head and that reason, to the extent that it is necessary to the universe, it accepts servitude. If it is not free, existence becomes empty or neutral, and if it is free, it is a game. The Earth, so long as she only generates cataclysms, of trees or of birds, is a free universe: the fascination of liberty was tarnished when the Earth produced a being which requires necessity as a law above the universe. Man has however remained free to no longer respond to any necessity: he is free to resemble all that is not him in the universe. He can remove the thought that it is him or that it is God that keeps everything else from being absurd.

Man escapes from his head as the condemned escapes from prison.

He has found beyond himself not God who is the prohibition of crime, but a being who ignores the prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me dream because he is without a head, which fills me with anxiety because he is made of innocence and crime: he holds a weapon of iron in his left hand, flames like a sacred-heart in his right hand. He brings together Life and Death in the same eruption. He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more me than me: his belly is a maze in which he loses himself, I am lost with him and I rediscover myself being him, he is called a monster.

That which I think and I represent, I do not think and represent alone. I write this in a small cold house in a fishermen's village, a dog just barked in the night. My room is next to the kitchen where André Masson happily shakes and sings; at the same moment where I write thusly, he puts on a phonograph, a disc of the overture of "Don Juan"; more than all else, the overture of "Don Juan" links the existence befallen to me to a challenge that works me to a ravishment outside of myself. At that same instant, I saw that headless [acéphale] being, the intruder that two equally gripping obsessions composed, becoming the "Grave of Don Juan". A few days ago, when I was with Masson in the kitchen, seated, with a glass of wine in hand, while he, his own death and the death of his own suddenly apprehended again, eyes fixed, suffering, almost shouted that death must become an affectionate and passionate death, shouted his hatred for for a world which weighs down on the paw of the employee, I could no longer doubt that the fate and endless tumult of human life is not open to those who exist with gouged out eyes, but only to those who exist as seers carried away by an overwhelming dream that could not be their own.

THE MONSTER

The different methods of the destructive expectation of the present translate into Sade, in the mental operations which preside over the different practices of "experimental" debauchery. Happiness consists not in pleasure, but in the desire to break the restraints that oppose desire, that is not in the presence, but in the expectation of absent objects that we will enjoy these objects —— that is to say we will enjoy these objects by destroying their real presence —— (the murder of debaucheries) —— or they disappoint us —— and they appear to refuse us their presence (in their resistance to what we would like to make them undergo) and we mistreat them in order to render their presence and their destruction (what in moral sadism is expressed for example in the sacrilege of the address of the absent God). Among some characters of Sade, the deception of the expectation finishes by becoming an erogenous fiction: the object does not disappoint, but we treat it as if it did. However, one of the much favored characters admits to only having wished to have; his pleasure has never been motivated by the objects which surround him, "but by those which are not there". "Is it possible to commit a crime as we conceive of it and as you speak it, for I admit that my imagination has always been beyond my means, I have always a thousand times more conceived that which I could not do and I am always complaining of nature which gives me the desire to offend, and always removes my means."

Here again Nature is lived like a provocative presence of expectation, a presence which seems to shirk away from aggressive expectation. The sadist conscience wants itself in the face of its own eternity that it has renounced and that it could no longer recognize under the traits of astute Nature: on the one hand maintained in the organic functions of the individual, it experiences the limits of aggression; on the other, in the movements of the imagination, it has the sensation of the infinite; but instead of finding there its eternal condition and its universal unity, it glimpses there in a mirror the infinite reflection diverse and multiple possibilities lost to the individual. This outrage to be inflicted on nature would cease to be individual, for it immediately and simultaneously totals all that Nature contains. It will reach a pseudo-eternity, a temporal existence, of a perverse polymorphism. Having renounced the immortality of the soul, the characters of Sade, in returning, pose their candidature for the integral monstrosity, thereby denying the temporal creation of themselves, their expectation paradoxically places them in the state of possession of all the possibilities of development and unconditional power, which they translate by their feeling of unconditional power. The erotic imagination which develops to the extent that the individual forms, sometimes by counterbalancing a perversion, sometimes by the instinct of propagation, and which chooses the moments of solitude and of expectation of the individual —— moments where the world and things are absent —— by invading itself, would thus correspond to an unconscious attempt to recover everything possible that has become impossible because of self-awareness —— that formation having permitted the realization of the other self —— thus corresponding to an activity of aggression, to the detriment of external reality, having for a goal the rediscovery of its original integrity. So much so that for the individual living in permanent expectation, the imagination resembles again an effort to escape the object that it expects, to return to the atemporal condition where the possession of all possible excluded the possibility of the experience of loss. By the mouth of his characters, Sade himself confesses: "I invented horrors, and I carry them out calmly: in a state to refuse me nothing, however expensive my projects of debauchery may be, I carried them out immediately." In effect, the solitary, the prisoner Sade deprived of all means of action, has in the end the same power as the omnipotent heroes because he dreams. The unconditional power which no longer knows resistance, which no longer knows the obstacles on the outside, nor on the inside of itself, which only feels a blind flow. "I carried them out immediately." Haste which hardly manages to exhaust the movement of "that sort of inconsistency, flail of the soul and too fatal prerogative of this sad humanity." Thus the soul, aspiring to deliverance, is prey to a contradictory hope; it hopes to escape the painful experience of loss in refusing the object its presence, while in the same moment it dies of desire to see the object restored in the present, to break within itself the destructive motion of time.

THE UNITY OF THE FLAMES

...a feeling of communal unity. This feeling that is felt by a human group when it finds itself an intact and complete force; it emerges and is exalted in holidays and in assemblies: a great desire of cohesion that then prevails over oppositions, isolations, the competitions of profane everyday life."

Vel' d'Hiv', June 7, 1936. —— When the crowd brought itself to the place where it was assembled with the immense sound of an tide —— "with a noise of the kingdom" —— the voices which made themselves heard above it cracked. It was not the speeches the crowd heard that made from it a miracle and which made it secretly weep, it was its own expectation. Because it does not demand bread alone, because its human greed is thus clear, thus limitless, thus as terrible as the flame —— it demands first of all that it EMERGE, that it be.

ACÉPHALE

IS THE EARTH

THE EARTH UNDER THE CRUST OF THE SUN IS AN INCANDESCENT FIRE

MAN WHO REPRESENTS THE DOWNTRODDEN

THE INCANDESCENCE OF THE EARTH

EMBRACES THEM

AN EXTATIC FIRE WILL DESTROY THE NATIONS

WHEN THE HUMAN HEART BECOMES FIRE

AND IRON

TO BE PUBLISHED IN OCTOBER 1936: THE G.L.M. EDITIONS

SACRIFICES

1 Mithra 2 Orpheus 3 The Crucified 4 Minotaur 5 Osiris

five etchings by

ANDRE MASSON

text by

GEORGE BATAILLE

Price of subscription

140 ex. to arches(?): 125 f . 10 ex to Japan 200f

G.L.M. EDITIONS