Image-Excitation, image-solitude. George Bataille et Walter Benjamin lisent La Condition humaine d’André Malraux

Abstract

Bataille’s and Benjamin's criticisms of André Malraux's novel La Condition humaine (The Human Condition) provide an image of the revolutionary intellectual preparing an act of suicide. From these divergent readings, a lesson must be drawn about the mobilizing political power of an image. Bataille understands revolution as a state of excitement which can be disposed of, where the material link between a life and the events that decide the destiny of a city is manifested. Revolution is considered an unproductive expense and, at the same time, an element of value in itself for those who devote themselves to it. This principle of pure loss is problematic, because its fervour is channelled under a perspective of appropriation. The insubordinate nature of the expenditure tends to be poured into a production of power in the form of sacred value, although only a fever gives the measure of this. For Benjamin, on the other hand, while the novel is charged with the dialectical tension from which the revolutionary action of the intellectuals proceeds, it remains captive to the circumstances of civil war and a nihilistic configuration of experience from which an image of the loneliness of the protagonists stands out, which becomes the essence of the supposed "human condition" and the consciousness from which they struggle.