Why do we crave death?

Somewhatmistaken posed some excellent questions in her comment to the previous post. I forwarded those questions to Georges Bataille, and he decided to send his next epistle early just so he could address them.

There is an important element of life to consider in death. Bataille takes great pains to point out the explosion of life involved in a corpse. Within minutes, insects have begun colonizing the dead flesh. Their young feast, grow to adulthood, and so a species is propogated. What's more, these colonies of insects break down the corpse into even smaller nutrative elements, allowing generations of plant life to thrive. The corpse as an explosion of life is invisible only to human beings, who are infinitely distracted in their horror of the corpse's putrefaction. Humans stand in a forest and gaze at eye level upon the thriving trunks of the trees, or above at the dew-shimmering canopy of trees. Perhaps they kneel to inspect the feathery ferns surging upward from the hidden forest floor. What humans inevitably fail to notice is that this profusion of life grows from an equal profusion of death lying upon the forest floor, the leaves decomposing in wondrous squalor, the many forest animals curled in their death pose just beneath the dirt, the bones of prey, the dirt that was once animal now feeding plants. Without this death, the forest would cease to exist. Death is always first and foremost the predecessor of life.

But none of this quite answers the question that began this post: Why do humans sometimes crave death? Could it indeed be some instinctual acknowledgment that death is the prerequisite for life? That idea pops up regularly throughout human thought. Freud postulated such a knowledge, relegating it to the subconscious mind (where he put most of the more interesting human impulses) and naming it the Death Impulse. He theorized that this death impulse resulted in people turning their inherent, animal violence inward upon themselves. If people allowed their inherent violence to express itself outward, they would not be able to live in a cooperative culture. Sublimating violence did not dispel our need to act violently, so from time to time our violence erupts. Since we don't let it out, the violence turns inward; we harm ourselves and so we end up seeking to destroy ourselves. Presumably, what motivates all this violence in the first place is a deep, secret knowledge that death is the most important thing for sustaining life.

Bataille disagrees. He wouldn't deny that humans harbor an innate impulse to violence. However, he said that our impulse toward violence has more to do with our divided nature than our involvement in cooperative culture. (He promised to write about our divided nature in a future epistle.) We crave death sometimes because death is the only movement that promises to release us from the world of things. (You will probably need to recall the discussion of the world of things from the last post for this to make sense.)

The world of things, which was opened up by our use of tools and our passionate embracing of the world of work, had a monumental consequence for humans: it made things out of us. Our value became equivalent to the value of things, of tools. Our value rested in the work we could do, and the value of work was always deferred. We lost our sovereignty. We lost our inherent value, the value of a sacred object. Consider a cross hanging on the wall. What is its value? Nothing, in the terminology of work. The cross performs no labor. Yet there it hangs upon the wall, the resources that went into its construction (including the labor of the humans who made it) wasted in a useless display. Yet the cross has a value of another kind--it carries a sacred value beyond the use-value of work. Its sacred character renders it sovereign, inherently and ontologically valuable. Human beings crave that very same value. We want to cease being things, as the cross has ceased being a thing, and we want instead to share in the sacred mystery that carries the cross's true value.

This is not about religion--the sacred is not necessarily equal to the religious. Religion just serves as a quick and easy example of the sacred. Bataille has threatened to write many, many epistles about the character of what is sacred.

Anyway. We crave to know the value of the cross as our own value. We desire the value animals, in their ignorance of work, know of themselves--a value that is at once both unquestionably valuable and worthless, a value that does not participate in the concept of value as it exists in the world of work. A value that is sacred.

And it is death that liberates us from the world of work. It is death that delivers us from being things, delivering us unto a sacred domain. Death provides a pivotal moment, in which our discontinuity from the world cracks apart, and in one brilliant expenditure of energy we cease being discontinuous, alone, and we become one with the world bodily. Our discontinuous self ceases to live in this world. Modern Christianity preaches the existence of a discontinuous, singular self of a soul living into immortality. Bataille doesn't think much of that--he is, after all, a fallen priest. Or rather, a man who graduated from seminary only to lose his faith and turn to theory and philosophy. But I hope the religious set doesn't hold that against him--he was, after all, able to delve into an entire world of thought forbidden to men of the cloth: the world of the body, which no philosopher before Marice Merleau-Ponty could bring himself to address.

So the attraction of death is really the desire to return to a lost sovereignty, to liberate ourselves from the world of things. I am, of course, butchering his pretty words and his well-crafted arguments, trying to distill such a long piece of work into tiny essentials. Elsewhere, Georges B. offers no less than two additional reasons underlying our desire for death. He may just have another one in the works. I offer this one because it strikes me as original and insightful. Plus, I'm just so damned happy to be getting his letters.