Das Lachen der Baubo

Fröhliches Nichtwissen (Nietzsche, Bataille, Lacan)

Abstract

With Nietzsche’s talk of »truth as a woman«, the gay science departs from idealist philosophy, dependent as it was on the phantasm of a nuda veritas to be unveiled in a masculine act of epistemological violence. If one follows Nietzsche’s reference to the mythological figure of Baubo and her self-exposing gesture, Nietzsche’s own practice becomes more pronounced, one in which the will to knowledge is to be overcome. Baubo’s gesture, which escapes any interpretative grasp, proliferates with Nietzsche: The essay argues that Georges Bataille’s mobilization, in the 1930s, of the figure of the Acéphale has to be seen, and not merely in an iconographic sense, a continuation of the Baubo. The same has to be said for Jacques Lacan’s theatrical presentation of Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World, an important source for his Seminar III: The Psychoses. These »fille-iations« of Baubo configure a thinking that opens itself towards the impossibility of a knowledge of its own origin, oscillating between the register of threat or castration, that of the enigma of fetishistic excitement as well as the boundless affirmation of a Gay Science. Whether Baubo’s apotropaic gesture is taken as obscene, menacing, comforting, or humorous, it inevitably opens the question of sexual difference and the possibilities for a symbolization of the feminine in masculine discourse.