Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939

by Georges Bataille, Allan Stoekl (Editor, translator, introduction), Carl R. Lovitt (Translator)

Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Batailles's positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward. This book challenges the notion of a "closed economy" predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This collection is indispensible for an understanding of the future as well as the past of current critical theory.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, France, Art, Anthropology

271 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.

Reviews

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some great contributions here on Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, fascism, and so on. Some impenetrable bits, too--though likely those should be read in close conjunction with his fictions, for mutual cross-illumination.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an undergraduate and then a graduate student during a period that fell on either side of the line demarcating the turn of the century I read and assimilated a great deal of Georges Bataille's writing. Something of a dissolute wild man, though one possessing not insubstantial scholarly discipline, it was no surprise that I was taken with Bataille. Certainly a fan of his quasi-pornographic 1928 novel STORY OF THE EYE, famously mobilizing as it does a fascinating and bold libidinal economy, I was even more taken with his subsequent novel BLUE OF NOON, which I found to encapsulate my own state of mental agitation (germane very specifically to my late teens and early twenties) better than any other work of fiction I had ever encountered (or ever would). As far as his theoretical writings were concerned, the Zone Books editions of his three-volume late-period pièce de résistance THE ACCURSED SHARE impacted me significantly, perhaps especially the opening volume on political economy, which very much blew my mind. As for Bataille's pre-war essays from the 20s and 30s, a great many of which were translated and editorially consolidated by Allan Stoekl in 1985 to comprise VISIONS OF EXCESS, the volume being presently considered: I have no small amount of experience with these either. A film major and philosophy minor who went on to attain a Film Studies MA, I studied French cinema of the 1930s extensively under internationally-respected Jean Renoir specialist Christopher Faulkner (who you can see holding forth on the special features of Criterion DVDs for a couple films by said master director). Studying under Faulkner meant engaging the French cultural, political, and intellectual landscape of the 1930s in all its minutiae. (We even studied maps of Paris.) In one of his seminar courses I was given the opportunity to present on Bataille, his adversarial relationship with the surrealists, and his considerable contribution to continental thought. "The Big Toe," collected here, was assigned reading for the course. VISIONS OF EXCESS does not collect all of Bataille's surviving theoretical writing of the 1930s--which is unsurprising considering such a volume would be comparatively massive--but rather a judicious, characteristic sample, covering three key phases that coalesced between 1927 and 1939. How are we to categorize Bataille? It would certainly be ill-considered to attempt to call him a philosopher. He is no such thing at the end of the day, and unstintingly reviles philosophical systems. From the standpoint of the current era Bataille looks more than a little like a critical theorist, though in the time and place he was writing the term was no being used. No. He was more or less a renegade social anthropologist. Though he is far more inflamed (not to say practically dangerous), he has more than a little in common with his contemporary Walter Benjamin (who we can more appropriately call a critical theorist), and his maverick method very much looks forward to Roland Barthes and Derrida. There would also clearly be no Michel Foucault without Bataille. In the 20s and 30s the most visible thing about Bataille would have been his contentious relationship with André Breton and the surrealists; it is important to note that though Bataille and Breton were engaged in vitriolic dispute, they were very much manifestations of the same basic zeitgeist, and we cannot engage either of them without situating their perspectives in relationship to the importance of psychoanalytic theory and Marxism. Bataille in his way interposes himself as a rogue bridge between Freud and Lacan. Though each valorized disruptive unconscious forces, what Breton rejected in Bataille was above all else what he denigrated as the "excremental" character of the latter's vision. Well, yeah, fair enough. At all points Bataille prizes the heterogeneous over the homogeneous, and asserts of his emergent Heterology that it “leads to the complete reversal of the philosophical process, which ceases to be the instrument of appropriation, and now serves excretion; it introduces the demand for the violent gratifications implied by the social life.” What we excrete is base matter, and base matter is sacred in relation to the profane things we are supposed to value. Science, religion, and philosophical systems become just as much about appropriation and acquisition as are capitalist systems, or, in fact, all institutions geared towards human utility. If Breton balks at the excremental and at base matter, the problem is his alone, reflecting an impotent and fatuous romanticism. In the 1930s Bataille had hopes for revolution, but there is no way to overlook that he is a terrible Marxist, and though dialectical materialist orthodoxy finds its way into his work as something he repeatedly grapples with and to some extent sublimates, he despises and has no patience with politicking, a tendency that only becomes more exaggerated in the face of the International Communist Party's intractable fealty to Stalinism. What he demands of revolution is something far more explosive and base: “profound complicity with natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood, sudden catastrophes and the horrible cries of pain that accompany them,” resulting in the “fall into stinking filth of what had been elevated.” He says of most Marxist theory that it is mostly “revolting utopian sentimentality.” This is obviously brazen stuff! As he moves further away from Marx and Hegel, Bataille takes with him his early love of the Marquis de Sade and falls increasingly in thrall to Nietzsche (and by extension Dionysus and Heraclitus), finally leading to his stating outright in "The Obelisk" that "Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its shell is to a bird contentedly absorbing the substance within.” Bataille reifies time: he sees time as the ground of Heraclitus and the heart of glorious Nietzschean tragedy, inherently "horror-spreading." He believes in “agitation on the scale of irreducible needs,” and the idea that humanity seems “able to subsist only at the limits of horror.” He despises fascism for its grotesque imperative mode, championing exclusively those manifestations of revolutionary emancipatory outrage that are genuinely subversive and refuse to repurpose old social and political models cast into disrepute. Both fascism and the Soviets show us “what frauds are acceptable to a mob limited by misery, at the mercy of those who basely flatter it.” As a young man, Bataille became deeply religious, a movement which was actually contrary to the temper of his (fraught) upbringing, so we can only understand his eventual ecstatic embrace of the "death of God" as a truly radical personal upheaval. Bataille is fundamentally a (base) materialist, and when he speaks of God (appropriate for a social anthropologist) it is always a transcendental God, precisely because it is a transcendental God that most societies have deployed as a shadowy agent of control. As something of a Spinozist, I have no problem locating God in the immanent and heterogeneous, but Bataille is disinclined to go there. Bataille's violent rejection of God becomes a violent rejection of the head, as the head is seen as “the conscious authority of God” keeping one subservient to function. Anything that is not wildly embodied myth, heterogeneous intensity, excretion, heated passion, sacrifice, the sacred, is rejected. God, the State, the political neuters, science, philosophy, writers producing literature in service to the leading of facile and pathetic lives by “the standards of salesmen,” out they go, out they go with the head. And so it comes to pass. In the third phase of the period represented in VISIONS OF EXCESS Bataille forms the Acéphale group, named for the headless man, in celebration of the rise of the headless man. The group got up to some pretty crazy business, apparently even discussing engaging in real human sacrifices, and in the writing of this period--look especially at "The Obelisk"--the domain of myth begins to take on something of an occult hue. (The amazing stuff on the pyramids in "The Obelisk" had me thinking of Kenneth Anger's film LUCIFER RISING.) In the essays collected in VISIONS OF EXCESS Bataille goes into very radical and sinister places without ever losing his exquisite scholarly poise. His language is invigorating yet always controlled. His rhetoric is pretty steady, you want to follow him (at least I do), and you stay with him despite the fact that he prescribes horror and prescribes it vehemently. Of course horror is also ecstasy. That is the rub. VISIONS OF EXCESS also had me thinking back on Volume One of THE ACCURSED SHARE, precipitating timely mediation concerning our despoiled planet and the calamity in store for us--which I think we might possibly frame as perhaps the final, most ghoulish and infernally orgiastic potlatch, expressing something like fidelity to the most ancient of customs--and also this other book, a book of science, Howard Bloom's THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE, which I believe a housemate of mine must have brought into our shared residence (shortly after the turn of the century), and which I would suggest is a great resource for those who Rebecca Solnit would deem lazy cynics should they feel compelled to defend their strident fatalism, demonstrating as the book does that the most intelligent species have always been (in aggregate) abhorrent monsters, abhorrence growing proportionately with intelligence. Granted, you might be a crypto-Hegelian who believes that at some point we will transcend history. More power to you. I have myself become increasingly serene over the years, and have come to frame my life in terms of spiritual practice. I could go through Bataille's essays and pick points I don't agree with--especially perhaps with his occasional wholly counter-productive introduction of Hegelean negation into his critical repertoire in the earlier pieces and his periodic argumentative fallacies--but what is most trenchant here is what I can carry with me still of this inflamed vision as a psychic energy that does not have to be embodied in the wild self-destructive profusion that characterized my early adulthood and which nearly killed me. Young Bataille would not have agreed with me, but I think it is possible to live for violence and orgiastic intensity as a gentle and caring person, even as one who wishes to participate in healing. The history of mankind might well be seen as a colossal conflagration and the forces inherent to its occurrence indelibly course through me, a human person. I believe in mindfulness, bearing, and right conduct. I know that a violent cosmic horror can pass through me beautifully and that I can live connection and powerful awe. I will myself destroy only very minimally, but I will live what Bataille prescribes: "The Practice of Joy Before Death." Today I went with a friend to keep her company while the veterinary hospital euthanized her very ill cat Luna. Our fellowship was sad, intense, and beautiful. Life is very, very violent and intense. The putrescence of death is inexhaustible. And I am grateful. If Bataille reminds us how much Nietzsche despised Socrates for the pithy way he held up "the good," it is only because the bottom line is always going to be the tragic and you will only suffer if you fail to affirm it. Married to the tragic is the realization that passion superseding reason is where we find our glory.

[Justin Cabrillos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bataille is a welcome relief from the dry philosophical inquiries of his era and he has a way of delivering his points with rhetorical flourish, often preferable to dry logical diagnosis. Who would have thought that one could turn excretion and expenditure into the basis of a philosophy? His attempt alone makes his essays worth reading.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few books I brought with me when I lived in Japan. Georges Bataille is one of the great 'thinkers.' Just to spend time reading him with a glass of sake is a fond memory for me.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of essays that have a healthy appetite for dissent. From aesthetics to culture, Bataille examines the individual and society. Idealism falls from the heavens and is defecated upon until life comes into focus.

[TL]

'It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light. It is too late to be reasonable and educated—which has led to a life without appeal. Secretly or not, it is necessary to become completely different, or to cease being.

The world to which we have belonged offers nothing to love outside of each individual insufficiency: its existence is limited to utility. A world that cannot be loved to the point of death—in the same way that a man loves a woman—represents only self-interest and the obligation to work. If it is compared to worlds gone by, it is hideous, and appears as the most failed of all. In past worlds, it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in our world of educated vulgarity. The advantages of civilization are offset by the way men profit from them: men today profit in order to become the most degraded beings that have ever existed.

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love. He who tries to ignore or misunderstand ecstasy is an incomplete being whose thought is reduced to analysis. Existence is not only an agitated void, it is a dance that forces one to dance with fanaticism. Thought that does not have a dead fragment as its object has the inner existence of flames.

It is necessary to become sufficiently firm and unshaken so that the existence of the world of civilization finally appears uncertain.

It is useless to respond to those who are able to believe in the existence of this world and who take their authority from it; if they speak, it is possible to look at them without hearing them and, even when one looks at them, to 'see' only what exists far behind them. It is necessary to refuse boredom and live only for fascination.

On this path, it is vain to become restless and seek to attract those who have idle whims, such as passing the time, laughing, or becoming individually bizarre. It is necessary to go forward without looking back and without taking into account those who do not have the strength to forget immediate reality.

Human life is exhausted from serving as the head of, or the reason for, the universe. To the extent that it becomes the head and this reason, to the extent that it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts servitude. If it is not free, existence becomes empty or neutral and, if it is free, it is in play. The Earth, as long as it only gave rise to cataclysms, trees, and birds, was a free universe; the fascination of freedom was tarnished when the Earth produced a being who demanded necessity as a law above the universe. Man however has remained free not to respond to any necessity; he is free to resemble everything that is not himself in the universe. He can set aside the thought that it is he or God who keeps the rest of things from being absurd.'

[Niousha mokhtari · Rating 5 out of 5]

"دوگانگی، ذاتی هر پدیدار دگرسان است. تخطی، مازاد، هذیان، و دیوانگی، هریک درحدی نشان از قلمروی دگرسان دارند: این موارد هرگاه به فعلیت درآیند قواعد همسانی اجتماعی را می‌شکنند. واقعیت آنها نیز از نظمی دیگر و متفاوت از همسانی ست، چرا که آن‌ها به ابژه‌ی دیگر انتقال یافته و سرایت می‌کند.
نمادهای دارای ارزش و بار معنایی احساسی نیز نقشی بنیادین در برانگیختن نیروهای دگرسان دارند. لذا، باتای به نفع پیوند تکمیل گرایانه‌ی میان لاهوتی/ناسوتی، هزینه پردازی/تولید، سرخوشی/ملالت و پراکندگی/تمرکز ارائه می‌کند تا این برهان را تقویت کند که یک ذهنیت بورژوا-سرمایه دار به نام مدرنبته، پیشرفت و عقلانیت، در حقیقت یک بعد را به زیان بعد دیگری از ارزش انداخته و بی مقدار می‌کند. جانکاه‌تر آنکه، این امر به انتقال یک شق این دوگانه به محیط های اجتماعی خاصی منجر شد، که نتیجه آن انزوا و انزجار آنها از یکدیگر بود، در حالی که دسترسی به اشکال جمعی، دگرسانی را از بورژوازی نیز مضایقه می‌کرد. با زعم باتای، این بازتاب های روان شناختی به لحاظ ذهنی تغییر شکل های تاریخی عینی مسببِ خیزش نظامی گری را تحکیم کرد."

[Petra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some essays are amazing imaginative and truly original and some are too wordy.

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Bataille's writings from this era that ranges from "could appear in an academic journal" (The Critique of the Foundation of the Hegelian Dialectic, the Psychological Structure of Fascism, maybe the Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade) to the outright surreal and borderline maddening (The Pineal Eye, The Obelisk, The Solar Anus) to works that have a mixture of the two (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Base Materialism and Gnosticism). There is also a quasi-religious/mystic chant "The Practice of Joy Before Death". In other words, the work is heterogeneous and I think heterogeneity is at the core of Bataille, if you could say there is a core.... it is definitely an influence.

Bataille's topics in general are those that are unassimilated, outside, excreted, in other words heterogeneous (eroticism, radical leftist/anti-fascist politics, sacrifices, lacerations, mutilations, ruptures, wounds, mysticism, ecstasy, etc.) When Breton called Bataille the "Excremental Philosopher" I am thinking Breton meant it as an insult, but really what Breton said in Bataillean terms is that Bataille is a philosopher of the heterogeneous, a heterologist (a neologism of his own making: a science of the completely other).

Bataille is often described as a "shadow" that follows behind post-structuralism, influencing Derrida and Kristeva, among others. Even in this way he is exterior. He is (was?) exterior to the academy, a librarian by profession, and tended to renounce being called a philosopher. He was a thinker of the completely other, of the expelled, of repulsion, of excrement, of an eroticism of death but also of ecstatic frenzy found in these things.

His writing can be opaque and it is not entirely clear what he means at points in this book (as opposed to books like The Accursed Share or Erotism, which I found to be much more clear, though residual opacity did remain at times). But seeing as though he has a book about "nonknowledge", maybe he was never meant to be understood, maybe you can't really understand the pure exteriority of humanity, but only experience it in eroticism, death, sacrifice, ecstasy and madness.

[Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never the same after reading Bataille. His words reach deep into my soul and confuse the hell out of me at the same time. Some of the essays in this book contain the most fascinating language I’ve ever laid my eyes on. Sentences like labyrinths… Grotesque and beautiful all at once

[Akın · Rating 5 out of 5]

excremental marxism par excellence

[Anekdotisch Probleem · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10 m'n favoriete filosoof

[Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good collection of Bataille’s essays and a good overview of his central concepts, interests, and concerns.

[Rupert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cultural theory, art criticism, philosophy and drunken shamanism all blended together with poetry by the world's most distinguished debauched librarian who favored human sacrifice.

[isabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

tempted to go the full five for the latter half essays on nietzsche alone, but honestly there's a lot here i feel the need to return to after spending more time with hegel (gasp, i know)

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of Bataille’s early essays attests to several trends in Bataille’s larger corpus: a dedication to anti-fascism, an obsession with eroticism, an insistence on the radicality of base materialism, a preoccupation with Hegel, an appreciation for the hermetic and mystical in the history of Western religious thought, and an affirmationism derived in no small part from Nietzsche. I will comment on a few of these themes.

Whether it be “Solar Anus,” where Bataille contends that humans are a copula, a parody of nature’s non-reproductive yet erotic expenditures or “The Language of Flowers,” in which Bataille argues that our metaphors and symbols of flowers’ beauty are devices to raise human ideals above the baseness of life, Bataille’s materialism is one that returns humanity to a baseness that discourses of rationality and reason have attempted to repress. Indeed, “Big Toe” marks Bataille’s attempt to illustrate how the big toe grounds humanity in a baseness it represses but cannot overcome. Rather than espousing the materialist understanding of matter as an inert and an isolatable phenomenon, Bataille’s “Materialism” counterintuitively insists on viewing materialism as “immediately based on psychological or social facts” (15). Bataille finds such a representation of matter found in Freud, whose work demonstrates a drive towards destruction that is found in nature. This contention of an active base matter, as Bataille demonstrates in “Materialism and Gnosticism,” decomposes all hierarchies that idealisms are founded upon. That is, there are no ‘laws’ in base matter that unwrite human existence and its artifices of reason. As a result, these essays signify Bataille’s grounding of human life in a baseness and drive towards destruction that is mirrored in an active base matter.
Bataille’s affirmationism is significantly influenced by his reading of Nietzsche. As argued in “Nietzsche and the Fascists,” Bataille alleges that contemporary fascists appropriating Nietzsche fail to understand how “Nietzsche’s thought constitutes, without any hope of appeal, a labyrinth, in other words, the very opposite of the directives that current political systems demand from their sources of inspiration” (187). Analogizing Judas’ betrayal of Jesus with Elizabeth’s, Nietzsche’s sister, betrayal of Nietzsche into the hands of Hitler, Bataille develops a distinctly anti-fascist Nietzsche whose impiety at the feet of Reason and refusal of nostalgia entails that the fascists and the political left alike are without merit in their appropriation of Nietzsche. Indeed, Bataille estimates that both the left and right have disowned Nietzsche precisely because they see only use values and servility (185). “Nietzschean Chronicle” further develops Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche as one who creates a non-servile power that bows before nothing. Noting how fascists turned to the past to instantiate the values and social cohesion lost in an unfolding civilization crisis, Bataille demarcates a Dionysian figure as a disruptive exuberance of life. Such a Dionysian figure, for Bataille, stares into an abyss and affirms life absent of any ultimate justification of it.

Similarly, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” was prompted by Mussolini and Hitler’s rise to power and provoked by the fact that many segments of the European working-classes were either indifferent towards or ardently supportive of various models of state racism. However, Bataille also discerns that a common obstacle originally stood in the way of Hitler and Mussolini’s rise to power: the state. Hitler and Mussolini surmounted this obstacle by draping the state in a Semitic cloak. Through Semitizing the state and associating it with the all too Jewish labor unions, fascist politicians and their allies in industry were able to destroy and then occupy the state. According to fascist logic, the state is to be overcome before it can be divinized. For Bataille, the consolidation of power in the hands of a few—which required both ecclesial and military support—meant that fascist rulers could violate all taboos of liberal society; they epitomize “a force that disrupts the regular course of things” (143). As such, fascists rulers, once in power, could unite a homogenous mass of people in the name of expelling that heterogenous evil from within: the Jew, the immigrant, the racial or sexual other. As Bataille states: “the homogeneous reduction develops, both as destruction and foundation, to the benefit of royal greatness” (148). In this predicament, Bataille claims that morality and idealism are not weapons any more than fascism is a weapon. Rather, the overflowing of affective life and its ecstatic properties are a weapon; and such weapon is often found amongst those who are fascism’s non-sovereignty heterogeneous other.

In sum, throughout this collection is Bataille insists on a disruptive and affective drive that, despite its repression by discourses of reason and its sadistic emancipation in the form of fascism, dispels any ultimate attempt to subjugate or justify human life.

[AG]

Ernst Bloch used “cold stream” and “warm stream” Marxism to delineate between scientific and humanist temperaments, and it might be fitting to designate a parallel difference between the “cold blooded” and “warm blooded” libidinal economists. If Horkheimer and Adorno, with their sociological remove, easily fall into the former camp, Bataille’s blood is practically boiling. The bipolar character of his writings is evidence of an unstable temperament, and reflects the sacred and the profane categories which suffuse his work, as well as the ambivalent character of his project of transvaluation.

Ambivalence: this term, taken in its psychoanalytic sense, characterizes Bataille in more ways than one. Chiefly, though, it subtends his attitude towards political action. Mostly written under the spectre of fascism, these early writings demonstrate Bataille’s uncomfortable relationship with the Marxist Left. The collection, taken in order, showcases an oscillation between the poles Marx-Nietzsche, each competing for the role of the consummate libidinal materialist. Marx, and his conception of the proletariat as a “mole” which, from the underground, hollows out the foundations of bourgeois society (Bataille’s reading prefigures Negarestani’s depiction of “holey space” in Cyclonopedia), is at first favorably pitched against Nietzsche’s all-too transcendental overman, for example. But by the end of the collection — the final essay penned in 1939 — Nietzsche’s crowned anarchy reigns, with an attempt to reappropriate his writings from the fascists.

Bataille’s political unrest, probably best captured in his novel Blue of Noon (written in 1935 on the eve of the Spanish Civil War but published in 1957), seems to derive from his hysterical suspicion that the Marxists have fatally downplayed the role of sexuality in mass politics. While Bataille’s model revolution is sexual, it is not a “sexual revolution” of the liberal sort. This latter ideal, culminating in ‘68’s anarcho-desirers (as Alain Badiou pejoratively describes them) and the counter-revolt establishing the “new spirit of capitalism” (a la Boltanski and Chiapello), would be the subterranean legacy of Bataille’s libidinal materialism. But there is a much darker vision of the future here, one in which the difference between anarchic excess and the fascist fetishization of the economy of sacrifice is almost indiscernable. In the last instance, it is tempting to view Land’s thanatropism as the culmination of Bataille’s anal materialism.

In Batailles’s view, the “heterological” element of society is situated on two opposite poles of hierarchy: the transcendent, divine exception to the law and the virulent base rejected by bourgeois society (it isn’t stated as such but it is useful to conceive of this latter element as that of lumpenproleteriat consciousness). Fascism is the introduction of base, lumpen element into the position of transcendence, with the effect of militaristically “rigidifying” the population. This is a view which, even more than its biopolitical siblings, takes on a Nietzschean physiological diagnosis of the body politic or social organism. As articulated in “The Labyrinth”, it is a corpuscular ontology which is like a rabid Spinozism set off the leash. Like Spinoza and Nietzsche, Bataille goes further than the positivists by taking their claim at face value: if all things are reducible to physical relations, then we should seek to describe mental or affective states in their entirety in terms of relations between bodies. The return to mythological thinking is possible only after a total physical reduction, a subordination the world to natural science. In the wake of this physicalization, it is possible to produce a mythological physics of sacrifice and exchange, a dynamics of affective intensity.

The minimal difference which separates Bataille from Nietzsche concerns the object of their affirmationist drive. For Nietzsche, this is life whereas, for Bataille, it is death. Why does this matter? In a post-Freudian age, there can only exist the persona Thanatos-Nietzsche. More importantly, it is evident that Bataille’s disavowed Catholic faith spurs his interest in ritual and sacrifice. There is no direct relationship, as in Nietzsche, with the will qua life, but instead a mediatory relationship with the Holy Mother, Death. The Bataillean imagination is populated by figures of the devouring Mother Mary; the abjection of body might be aligned with a partial, failed identification which is revived in a return of the repressed ambivalence of love-hate.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

Equal parts brilliant and equals parts insane. Bataille sings the delirious praise of all things base, excremental and impure, things at the other pole of the sacred. I enjoyed reading Bataille's fragmentary ruminations on the sheer irreducibility of matter to thought (unlike ordinary materialism which simply places dead matter at the summit) and his spirited defense of nietzsche's "myth of the future" against the fascist appropriations that seek to chain men to the past. Many of the shorter pieces have a burst of mystical violence about them, through which the sense of contagion is communicated to the reader, lacerating and butchering them open. Perhaps not the best introduction to Bataille's thought, but a feast nonetheless.

[Zac Sydow]

if bataille understands one prescient point it is that "political revolution" needs to spend its time in the shitty no fun depths of materialism to be even slightly worthwhile. He makes (or borrows? i forget) a nice metaphor for this in the eagle vs the mole, the burning heat of the sun and the unknown caves of the earth etc etc (he basically does this the whole book). aside from this a lot of these essays read like something i would be embarrassed to hand in for an undergraduate class with occasionally interesting put downs of surrealism and good spots of "marxist analysis". i'm not sure about this as a flattering introduction but i would give him another look. i drank way too much coffee

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is something tragic in the simple fact that Levinas's error is possible (for it is no doubt a question in this case of an error, not of a prejudice.) The contradictions that are killing men suddenly appear strangely insoluble... Those freed from the past are chained to reason; those who do not enslave reason are the slaves of the past. In order to constitute itself, the game of politics demands such false positions, and it seems impossible to change them. Transgressing with one's life the laws of reason, answering even against reason the demands of life, is in practice, in politics, to give oneself, bound hand and foot, to the past. Nevertheless, life demands to be freed no less from the past than from a system of rational and administrative measurements."

the nietzsche essays jokerfied me

[Wan Feng An · Rating 2 out of 5]

This man was the OG shizoposter. Goes from weird speculative fiction to dry and rambling essays on Hegel and dialectics. Some essays go pretty hard, such as The Big Toe and The Practice of Joy before Death, most of which come from the first part of the collection. Honestly just read the first part, skim the third and skip the middle.

[jake davies]

"a gumbo of mystic confusion and moments of clarity, but would recommend familiarising yourself with nietzsche first (will to power and zarathustra specifically) - which i haven’t done, so i will definitely be returning to this in the future

bataillean marxism is vital right now to combat contemporary utilitarian society"

[William Zeng · Rating 5 out of 5]

YOU KNOW WHAT IM JUST GONNA SAY I READ IT. THERE.

[David Gjorgoski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in love with this man

[daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

En essäsamling som säkert är full av kött för någon som försöker förstå idéerna och historiken bakom Batailles tänkande men om man redan löst honom känns det mesta igen. På slutet handlar det mesta om Nietzsche så där somnade jag till lite och skummade mest.

Väl översatt och lättläst men man måste nog vara väldigt sugen på Bataille för att närläsa allt.

[thevibe300 · Rating 5 out of 5]

daca mai scriu alt review pentru o alta carte de-a lui Bataille (deja v-ati dat seama ca nu mai e cale de oprire) e pentru ca inca mai sunt parti din scrierile lui surprinzator inca relevante pentru mine si pe care nu pot sa le acopar decat pe bucatele si cu o lipsa de context sacaitoare, deci asta e tot ce pot in momentul de fata-

Din introducere nu puteam sa nu ma folosesc putin de paragraful asta care sumarizeaza cele doua tendinte principale ale lui Bataille (ambele esuate) vizibile in toata cartea:
"The valuing of community or society over the radicality of experience itself would, in the end, result in a vision of an ultimate homogenous social structure that uses sacrifice or festivals"
- the "acephalic" position (sa zicem pozitia care face ca Bataille sa fie vazut ca un mistic, legata de nevoia de comuniune si sacrificiu - "the need to lose oneself as the need to find onself" / "human beings united with each other through rents or wounds" etc)
vs
"sheer negativity of the individual (...) seen for a moment from the point of view of the larger community, can only be a nihilistic emptiness that, headless or not, elevates itself as an absolute and therefore leads at best to simple individual death or wandering, and at worst to extremely sinister political configurations" ( deci o negare care se asociaza cu o atractie spre fascism si violenta) / ("the need to lose oneself beyond the need to find oneself" ajungand pana la "a measureless annihilation in a violent expenditure whereby the possession of a new object, of a new woman or a new man, is only a pretext for an even more annihilating expenditure")

- ce ramane nu e o competitie intre cele doua, ci mai degraba interactiunea intre ele (la fel ca lana del rey, he's got a war in his mind)

si tot in introducere contradictia intre "Bataille's embrace of the heterogeneous- animality, flies, excrement" si "his tendency, in spite of all this, to reason", asa cum remarca si inamicul lui nr. 1, Andre Breton:
"M. Bataille's misfortune is to reason: admittedly, he reasons like someone who "has a fly on his nose", which allies him more closely with the dead than with the living, but he does reason"

din textele propriu-zise si sublinierile mele (pentru ca am masacrat cartea asta, in special "Sacrifices", care a fost preferatul meu si e mazgalit cap coada)

THE SOLAR ANUS - am inceput sa apreciez mai mult partea de poezie a lui Bataille si o data cu ea si the solar anus, are stilul lui...
"Love, then, screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun"

THE LUGUBRIOUS GAME - legat de pictura lui Dali cu acelasi titlu "It is true that I am speaking here of what already sinks into oblivion when Dali's razors carve into our faces the grimaces of horror that probably risk making us vomit like drunkards this servile nobility, this idiotic idealism that leaves us under the spell of a few comical prison bosses"

THE OLD MOLE AND THE PREFIX "SUR"- replica la suprarealismul lui Andre Breton si altele... "and down with denigrators of an immediate "human interest", down with all the scribblers and their spiritual elevation and their sanctified disgust for material needs"

SACRIFICIAL MUTILATION AND THE SEVERED EAR OF VINCENT VAN GOGH - "But how is it possible that gestures incontestably linked to mental disorder may be spontaneously designated as the adequate expression of a veritable social function , of an institution as clearly defined, as generaly human as sacrifice? (...) But it is no less striking that, in our day, with the custom of sacrifice in full decline, the meaning of the world, to the extent that it implies a drive revealed by an inner experience, is still as closely linked as possible to the notion of a spirit of sacrifice, of which the automutilation of madmen is only the most absurd and terrible example" - pune in paralel automutilarea din procesele psihopatologice si sacrificiul religios, ca scapare de sub control a unui impuls primitiv uman

THE USE VALUE OF D. A. F. DE SADE - f util intr-adevar!!!

SACRIFICES (pentru alta data)

THE SACRED CONSPIRACY
"Man escaped from his head like the condemned man from his prison.
He found beyond him not God, who is the prohibition of crime, but a being who doesn’t know prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless, who fills me with anguish because he is made of innocence and crime. He holds a weapon of steel in his left hand, flames like a sacred heart in his right hand. He unites in one eruption birth and death. He is not a man. But he isn’t a god, either. He is not I, but he is more I than I: his belly is the labyrinth in which he himself goes astray, led me astray, and in which I find myself being he, that is, a monster."

+ textele despre Nietzsche (in sfarsit citesc o perspectiva diferita de a lui Deleuze in legatura cu el si tot foarte placut!)

ma rezum la acest review obosit asta e tot ce aveam in cap pupici!!!

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introduction
• In the absence of a biography of Bataille, the details of his life that we mention here, details that we should perhaps take with a grain of salt, al come from his own writings
• Bataille’s obsessions were in many ways directly related to Oedipal terrors, perhaps even more Oedipal in that his father was blind.
• Bataille felt that by August 1927 the psychoanalytic cure had done away with ‘‘sinister’’ and apparently violent episodes that threatened him (and perhaps others)—but fortunately it had not done away with the ‘‘intellectual violence’’ (VII, 460) that he would continue to explore for the rest of his life.
• We do not intend to imply, however, that Bataille’s obsessions as theory are simply reducible to a putative ‘‘origin’’ in neurosis or psychosis, and thus can be simply dismissed. Indeed Bataille’s theory itself would tend to make problematic any such naive causal model.)
• Bataille by 1927 (in ‘‘“The Solar Anus’’) was already developing an approach to what he would call later (in, among other essays, ‘‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’’) heterogeneous matter— matter so repulsive that it resisted not only the idealism of Christians, Hegelians, and surrealists, but even the conceptual edifice-building of traditional materialists. It was indeed an all-out assault on dignity.
• Breton (surrealist) in effect condemns Bataille as an *‘excremental philosopher.’’ Breton specifically dismisses Bataille because he sees a profound contradiction between Bataille’s embrace of the heterogeneous—animality, flies, excrement—and his tendency, in spite of all this, to reason.
o Breton claims Bataille’s disorder—attempting to reason about what is simply unreasonable—is pathological. Calls the condition PSYCHASTHENIA
• The essay ‘‘The ‘Lugubrious Game’ , ’must be seen in the context of two fragments, unpublished in Bataille’s lifetime, that are, for their scope and theo- retical audacity, among his most important writings.? These are ‘‘The Jesuve’’ and ‘‘The Pineal Eye.”’ Both circle around an ‘‘excremental fantasy,”’ a legacy of an anal fixation worked out in Bataille’s psychoanalytic cure. This fantasy involves, through the process of evolution, the movement of a tremendous erotic force up from the ape’s provocative anus to the erect human’s head and brain. The next stage of evolution, manifested by a kind of parodic Nietzschean super- man, posits a ‘‘pineal eye,’’ a final but deadly erection, which blasts through the top of the human skull and ‘‘sees’’ the overwhelming sun. The point here is not to sublate the anal obsession, but to embrace it; the dialectical procedure of the psychoanalytic cure when completed suddenly falls, and with it the dialectical movement of human evolution as well.
o It must be remembered, however, that evolution (and thus the dialectic) is not simply escaped or done away with. It is impossibly fulfilled, and completed, at the recurrent instant in which it is ruptured and annihilated. Bataille’s text itself stands in an impossible neutral space between absolute knowledge and its im- placably hostile double, sheer loss. Yet the text is neither one nor the other; it is precisely the conjoining of the two that establishes their identity as automutila- tion, their violent doubling. In fact one of Bataille’s other essays from this period of Documents is an affirmation of the madman’s duality and automutilation: ‘“Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh.”
• Bataille precisely recognizes that the fall of the elevated and noble threatens the coherent theory of allegory itself. This is not to imply that allegory 1s simply done away with in Bataille—any more than is the dialectic—but rather, that what Bataille works out 1s a kind of head- less allegory, in which the process of signification and reference associated with allegory continues, but leads to the terminal subversion of the pseudostable references that had made allegory and its hierarchies seem possible. The fall of one system is not stabilized, is not replaced with the elevation of another; the fall in Bataille’s allegory is a kind of incessant or repetitious process. Thus filth does not ‘‘replace’’ God; there is no new system of values, no new hierarchy. ENDING PHALLIC BINARIES!!
The Solar Anus
• the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
• But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream IAM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.
• The solar annulus 1s the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night.
Eye
• Cannibal delicacy. It is known that civilized man is characterized by an often inexplicable acuity of horror.
o One of most singular and developed of such horrors: fear of the eye
o It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror.
o For the eye—as Stevenson exquisitely puts it, a cannibal delicacy—is, on our part, the object of such anxiety that we will never bite into it.
Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh
• Opens with case of automutilator (61) influenced by Van Gogh
o “It did not seem very hard,’’ he added, ‘‘after contemplating suicide, to bite off a finger. I told myself: I can always do that.”
• Once a decision is reached with the violence necessary for the tearing off of a finger, it entirely eludes the literary suggestions that may have preceded it; the order that the teeth had to carry out so brusquely must appear as a need that no one could resist.
• at least so long as these gods stupefied them; mutilation normally intervened in these relations as sacrifice: it would represent the desire to resemble perfectly an ideal term, generally characterized in mythology as a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs.
• But how 1s it possible that gestures incontestably linked to mental disorder (even if they can never be seen as the symptoms of a specific mental illness)’ may be spontaneously designated as the adequate expression of a veritable social function, of an institution as clearly defined, as generally human as sacrifice?
• Even in antiquity, the insane were known to have characterized their mutilations in this way: Areteus® writes of sick people he saw tearing off their own limbs because of reli- gious feelings and in order to pay homage to gods who demanded this sacrifice. But it is no less striking that, in our day, with the custom of sacrifice in full de- cline, the meaning of the word, to the extent that it implies a drive revealed by an inner experience,* 1s still as closely linked as possible to the notion of a spirit of sacrifice, of which the automutilation of madmen is only the most absurd and terrible example.
• It is true that this demented part of the sacrificial domain, the only one that has remained accessible to us, to the extent that it belongs to our own patho- logical psychology, cannot simply be opposed to its counterpart, religious sacri- fices of men and animals: the opposition even exists within religious practice, which itself confronts classic sacrifice with the most varied and insane forms of automutilation.
• The circumcision rite, in most cases, does not result in such scenes of delir- ium; it represents a less exceptional form of the religious ABLATION of a part of the body, and even though the patient himself does not act, this rite can be seen as a kind of collective automutilation.
• If one followed these associations, the use of the sacrificial mechanisms for various ends, such as propitiation or expiation, would be seen as secondary, and one would only retain the elementary fact of the radical alteration of the person which can be indefinitely associated with any other alteration that suddenly arises in collective life: for example, the death of a relative, initiation, the con- sumption of the new harvest . . . Such an action would be characterized by the fact that itwould have the power to liberate heterogeneous elements and to break the habitual homogeneity of the individual, in the same way that vomiting would be opposed to its opposite, the communal eating of food. Sacrifice considered in its essential phase would only be the rejection of what had been appropriated by a person or by a group.’* Because everything that is rejected from the human cycle is altered in an altogether troubling way, the sacred things that intervene at the end of the operation—the victim struck down in a pool of blood, the severed finger or ear, the torn-out eye—do not appreciably differ from vomited food. Repugnance is only one of the forms of stupor caused by a horrifying eruption, by the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume. The one who sacrifices is free—free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim, to vomit his own being just as he has vomited a piece of himself or a bull, in other words free to throw himself suddenly outside of him- self, like a gall or an aissaouah. 70
The Jesuve
• Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. 73
The Use Value of DAF de Sade
• The life and works of D. A. F. de Sade would thus have no other use value than the common use value of excrement; in other words, for the most part, one most often only loves the rapid (and violent) pleasure of voiding this matter and no longer seeing it.
• Sade’s sadism:
o 1. An irruption of excremental forces (the excessive violation of modesty, positive algolagnia, the violent excretion of the sexual object coinciding with a powerful or tortured ejaculation, the libidinal interest in cadavers, vomiting, defecation
o 2. A corresponding limitation, a narrow enslavement of everything that 1s opposed to this irruption.
• ON HETEROLOGY
o Excretion is not simply a middle term between two appropriations, just as decay is not simply a middle term between the grain and the ear of wheat.
o IT IS NOT A MIDDLE TERM BETWEEN APPPROPRIATIONS
Sacrifices
• Me,' I ,exist—suspended in a realized void—suspended from my own dread— different from all other being and such that the various events that can reach all other being and not me cruelly throw this me out of a total existence. But, at the same time, Iconsider my coming into the world—which depended on the birth and on the conjunction of a given man and woman, then on the moment of their conjunction. There exists, in fact, a unique moment in relation to the possibility of me—and thus the infinite improbability of this coming into the world appears. For if the tiniest difference had occurred in the course of the suc- cessive events of which I am the result, in the place of this me, integrally avid to be me, there would have been ‘‘an other.’’

[Bertrand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading reviews from other GR readers I am surprised to see many find him contradictory, when what maybe struck me most in those texts written over nearly fifteen years was the rigour, the cohesion of his diverse strands of thought, and its distinctly systematic character: more than contradictions it is perhaps the cherished paradoxes on which he builds an otherwise meticulous edifice that leave people uneasy, a turn of mind that testify to his avowed roots in avantgarde culture, and which I have encountered often enough not to mind the leap of faith it demands:
At the beginning -of existence, of social life, of individual psychology- was expenditure. Here might be both the most simple, but also the more difficult and the more fascinating of Bataille's argument.
In his strictly materialist view the fundamental impulse of man is consumption, in French 'dépense', a wasting of energy, resources or health (of anything that separate us from the crushing submission to nature in death) which crucially must be understood as an absolute end in itself and an existential imperative. Expenditure takes many forms in many different contexts, from the gift economy of Marcel Mauss to the ritual sacrifice of the Aztecs, and carries, in proportion to its purity (to its standing as its own end, escaping instrumentalisation), a sense of the sacred. This sacred was visible in ancient civilisations, relegated to heterodoxy during the christian age, but is still driving to this day the most authentic cultural forms, because all of human culture, being fundamentally contingent, is, at heart, expenditure. When function or instrumentality creeps into it, it becomes debased and looses its timeless existential value.
The existential value of expenditure is expressed in largely nietzschean terms, maybe the most visible and durable influence on Bataille's thought: expenditure constitute the concrete and practical form of 'Bejahung', that 'saying yes to life' which constitute both the essence of tragedy and the existential imperative of worldliness. In Bataille this takes a potentially even more radical turn, given the aesthetic fascination that drive his thought and his fiction, for all the sights rejected by the tidy, functional and superficial spectacle of bourgeois society: Bejahung becomes 'the practice of joy before death', and the nietzschean suspicion of contemplation is overcome in a pervasive but fundamentally materialist and immanent mystique of death. Facing death and contemplating its imminence and inevitability ties Bataille's Nietzsche back with a christian mystique tradition that provides, in the age preceding the death of God, the missing link between XXth century philosophy and ancient tragic thought.
Much like death (the cadavers, severed body parts and gushing blood are the best remembered elements of his erotica) is granted a special ontological status on the basis of its absolute uselessness, so are bodily fluids, shit, piss or sperm, which become, in virtue of their being expenditure in the most literal sense, the fundamental units of culture. Delivering poetry, improvising music or speaking in tongues, in that system, are on a par with taking a shit or vomiting in the gutter. This presupposition grounds what Bataille (and his followers) call base materialism, around which is woven his art criticism and engagement with surrealism. Breton, figure-head of that movement, for all his luciferian posturing was, all in all, prim and stuffy, carefully policing the borders of his movements through grandiloquent pronouncements and vociferous anathema that only reach us today daubed in ridicule and megalomania. Beyond those frontiers lay, for him, dissipation, pathology or idealism. This is where -off-centre, many would say today- Bataille starts his sabotage. Recognising the surreal (the visceral, 'convulsive' otherness sometimes surfacing in the polished surface of everyday life) in elements the surrealist orthodoxy had carefully disavowed, he seeks their shared ground, their lowest (basest) common denominator, which he find in some kind consuming frenzy, consuming both in terms of absorption and in terms of self-destruction.
The apex of his thought, although only outlined in the present volume, seems to be his conceptions of communication and community, which I have seen credited as an important source of the 'communautarian' debates of Nancy, Taylor, Bellah, Bell and others. It seems crucial in redeeming Bataille's political thught (when it comes close verge on the messianic navel-gazing), by providing a sturdy link between expenditure, his central concept of existential consumerism, and his other, more overtly political marxism. The wedding of the two, in his early thought, is not a peaceful one and the expected contradiction often arise. In the later period covered by this book (later Bataille would, after WW2, turn debatably 'apolitical') – that of the College of Sociology, attended by a number of luminaries orbiting around Bataille and his endeavours, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Lacan – Bataille developed an interesting analogy between love – not understood (only) in its platonic sense – and society in general: to cut to the chase, the expenditure of love comes both tears apart the individual and produce a new stable being, from the material (s)he and his or her partner expended. This only last an instant but must form the basis of community in general, one that can only be founded in the expenditure-sacrifice of its members, at the sole condition that the community be not utilitarian but that the expenditure and the community it produces become an end in itself.

I am no puritan – but I find I often see with much suspicion thinkers who give sexuality too central a place in their systems: this might come from living in an age where sex has become the conveniently delimited arena in which transgressions can be safely re-enacted, or maybe from too many writers applying a thin veneer of psychoanalysis to grant their thought, in a single blow, both the glitz of decadence and the sheen of scientific accuracy. The joy I felt in reading Bataille, then, despite the omnipresence of sex as the privileged locus authenticity (a kind of atavism testifying to the permanence of human condition) testifies to both the quality of his writing style (sex never feels lavished or utilised to give banal ideas undue privileges) and the absence of a rhetoric of 'nature' or normalcy (sex, and its more elaborate manifestation, culture, is intrinsically perverse and self-destructive – thus as much as all culture is sexual, we can also say that all sex is cultural).

There are obvious issues with such a view: first and foremost is the messianic character of his marxism, that like his pairs make maybe for a great cultural critique but permanently displace action -and thus justice- in a vaguely defined future. The revolution, or communism, become in this perspective little more than a myth, one useful maybe to shape and discipline individual consciousness, but ultimately only useful, a term I would imagine Bataille was none to keen on. His rejection of the strictures of political parties (avowed marxist he opposed stalinism but was never affiliated with any other currents, save maybe that of Souvarine for a time) and his related rejection of all instrumentality can only lead to some kind of Hakim-Bey-style spontaneism, where free culture magically provide free political organisation (his friend Kojeve would scold him for trying 'to make something out of nothing') – a common enough trait in those circles, but one which in his case, in light of biography, tarnish his commitment, leave us only an armchair (or bedroom, or kitchen table) philosopher.

Can I say I 'believe' Bataille? Probably not: I have probably not yet read enough philosophy to feel the same sense of explanation I can have more spontaneously toward sociology for example (not that I have read much sociology, however). Bataille, like much of pre-WW2 philosophy, I appreciate just as I appreciate the avantgarde: less for the more or less coherent living systems they propose, than for 'baring the device', the criticism through parody those same system conduct on modernity - 'alternative modernities' as the saying goes. None of those alternatives move me enough to accept or believe the kind of radical break in the continuity of time (revolutions) or in that of personal experience (mystique and/or existentialism) they posit. Bataille is no different: although his system is, from what I have read so far, possibly the most coherent and original one I know (the fact he has graduated from the 'avantgarde' department into the 'philosophy' one reflect I think the quality of his thought) it remains an object of curiosity, an object of contemplation, and ultimately one that is not really 'base' in the sense of 'base materialism'. In other words it is an idea, a highly fascinating one, but because of its overly theoretical character and its sometimes indulgent use of notions of unconscious, it is 'just' an idea. The structural inversion he operates, in line with what was then already a tradition, effectively turns functionalism on its head, but simultaneously his commitment to mass materialism makes him a real man of his time.

[Jark Lulle]

Oerhört fascinerande. Vissa formuleringar är guld:

"Det är lönlöst att svara de som förmår tro på den här världens existens och som får sin auktoritet av den."

Det ska jag fan i mig brodera på en kudde.

Annars? En fransk perverterad bibliotekarie som grundade hemliga esoteriska sällskap samt influerade en mängd stora 1900-tals filosofer. What's not to love?

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

The key reason I never mark things off as read that're incomplete nor make notes/review said books is not because I have much to lose in the digital public (i.e. the public) raising a lugubriously mimetic eyebrow, but rather because this site is an invaluable, relatively public, catalog which I annually update on flash drives in order to preserve notes for a plethora of reasons.

This evening I must make an exception.

Although I have not even thought about Georges Bataille in a decade in the way one climbing a ladder seldom reflects upon rungs, nor anuses upon tissue paper (re: Saint Wolfgang and the Devil), I took a glance at old volume of his I'd marked up said years ago. I was less looking for a gem than glancing over whatever robust idiocies had picqued my interest in the days of Rimbaud and Verlaine (I was seventeen; __________). Needless to say I found nothing nothing there: Christ-this, de Sade-that, phallic-this, Bronte-that. Further, however, a note: 'Visions of Excess.'

Ah yes, Minnesota. Some good ones in this series. This volume itself includes:

'The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its
surface.'

This was preceded by something about love being a parody of rotten eggs, in a chapter entitled 'The Solar Anus.'

Thank you for the laugh, Monsieur Bataille. The laugh was good, hearty, and completely unexpected . It is not going to get better than that, so I finish this note in good jest thankful I revisited thee.