Date:
Location:
"'Man Has Escaped His Head': Georges Bataille, Walter Otto, and the Antifascist Avant-Garde"
Speaker:
Nate Herter, PhD Candidate in Classical Philology, Department of the Classics, Harvard University.
Contact:
Charles Gaillard
cgaillard@fas.harvard.edu
Chair:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Abstract:
While the place of classical antiquity in the fascist and Nazi imaginaries of the interwar period has in recent years become an important area of historical study, leftist and avant-garde responses to the appropriation of the cultural politics of antiquity from the same period have received less attention. This talk will consider the reception of the Greco-Roman god Dionysus in the thought of the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille, who adopted the god as an emblem of his antifascist and parareligious movement Acéphale, as well as the role played by German philologist Walter F. Otto’s unorthodox work on Dionysus in Bataille’s diagnosis of the social malaise of modernity. Where Otto’s text argues that religious studies had failed to grasp the irrational and nonfunctionalist core of religious experience, Bataille suggests that fascism’s ability to offer simulacra of these same essential impulses, effectively foreclosed in capitalist modernity, make it a more dangerous threat than had previously been imagined. As the specter of a renewed far-right movement rises again around the world, understanding previous attempts to resist rightist appropriation of the cultural space remains as vital as ever.
