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An intentional subject conceived ontologically as the exigency of a problematic closure is not defined, in Bataille's text, as an originary receptivity which would be neutral or mechanical. Instead, intentionality itself is defined as the inescapable priority of a form of closure. This closure is the interdit or prohibition. Its primacy in the context of cognition or intentionality is the primacy of the effort d'autonomie as a basic predicate of ipseity. The interdit is a contamination of the notion of a receptivity defined as an originary comprehension — however limited or approximate — which would be founded and conditioned by an adequate breach between subject and object. Bataille's invocation of the interdit as an integral moment of the cognitive function of discontinuity, and the resulting definition of cognition as a "contaminated" receptivity, are designations of subjectivity as a moment or comportment for which the predicate "comprehension" is simultaneously excessive and insufficient — as is the predicate "integrity" for the moment of closure. The empirical reference for this notion of contamination in Bataille's text is the universality of prohibitions regarding death and sexuality in human societies, and a complementary devotion of the human community to work and to a logic of utility which would be solidary with the comportment of work. For Bataille, an institutionalized blindness to that aspect of life which transcends or exceeds survival is the condition for the unicity of a logic of utility which commands the "profane" world of work. Inspired by the Heideggerian meditation of utility in Being and Time, and more deeply, by Nietzche's perception of survival as a cornerstone of philosophy, Bataille posits as a condition for the manipulative protention of tool manufacture and use, the abolition of the affective protention that would envisage a cadaver.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-7449-4_3

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