The “Diabolic” Idiom of French Postmodernism and the “Politics of Diversity” in America
ABSTRACT
The contemporary author that has contributed possibly the most original discussion of the mysterious coexistence of good and evil is Georges Bataille. More than a poet with a knack for the social sciences, Bataille was an aspirant counter-initiate who sought to fashion a modern renascence of Dionysian worship, complemented by an original anti- Catholic mythography. What is fascinating in this connection is that a number of key sociological insights from Bataille’s oeuvre, re-confected through the plagiaristic “theories” of French philosopher Michel Foucault, have come to be adopted in the USA as the scholarly basis of the postmodern movement, especially of the so-called “discourse of diversity,” which ultimately serves as a politically correct instrument of divisiveness. This essay traces the late construct of diversity” to Bataille’s sociology by way of Foucault’s academic re-digestion of the latter, with a view to defining the forthcoming challenges for civil society vis-à-vis postmodernism’s conservative policy of “multicultural” fragmentation.