The Impossible

by Georges Bataille

In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry, and in poems Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible. The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy.

Genres: Fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, France, French Literature, Literature, Theory

Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

“…if Diana had a mate at all he might be expected to bear the name not of Jupiter, but of Dianus or Janus…” James George Frazer – The Golden Bough.
Dianus was Diana’s priest and her lover – he was human and he served divine…
The Impossible is a complex philosophical and existential novelette of the corporeal and spiritual nature of man – about the unity and opposition of these two origins…

I feel dizzy and my head spins. I discover that my “self-confidence” makes me what I am – precisely because it deserts me. If I no longer have my assurance, a void opens up at my feet. The reality of being is the naive certainty of chance and the chance that elevates me leads me to ruination. I am ashamed to think that I am inferior to the greatest: so much so that I never think about it, I forget that others know nothing about me.

The reference to Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre is obvious… And there are a lot of allusions to the other sources as well: Don Juan and The Stone Guest, A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, Marquis de Sade, many ancient myths and various philosophical works.
And in its crucial point the tale brilliantly echoes The Castle by Franz Kafka – an impossibility to achieve a true purpose – one might enter the castle but the goal one would have found there would have been false…
And it is impossible to serve simultaneously Heaven and Hell…
“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Matthew 6:24
Some serve gods and some just serve rats…

[Tony Vacation · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Impossible is not impossible to summarize, but it doesn't exactly go down smoothly in a blurb. Originally titled The Hatred of Poetry, Bataille's collage of journal entries, essayistic bouts of self-psyche mutilation, and minimalist grotesque poems that together form a disjointed and pessimistic manifesto about the power of unhealthy obsession as a means of transcending loathsome humanity to obtain a pure, artistic ideal, a.k.a., the Impossible. Sounding any more palatable? Well, methinks this work was designed to take bites out of its reader, not the other way around. Written in a fragmented and abstract style that often reads like a suicide's mewling, this philosophical work recounts the vague but lurid love triangle between the narrator, his wormy lover (called B.), and his priestly pal (called A.). The fear of the inevitability of death coupled with crippling pining work as the catalyst for extended meditations on desire and being. Not sure how much of this book is fact or fiction, but the chunk of poetry at the tail-end of the book was my favorite part. I can't help but be pretty damn sure that M Gira is a fan of this book (or Bataille at least) as the two share a similar tone of visceral gloom and doom with their imagery. I'll be honest and say I don't think I understand all of what The Impossible is about, but its coils of perverse morbidity tweaked my decadent gothic sensibilities and left me a happy reader.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bataille's theories of desire, here, seem to center on the idea of a thing (person/system/scenario), pushed to extremes in the mind, being of much greater significance (possibly transcendence) than the thing itself. In ideas, only, they can move outside of their (probably completely mundane) reality and perhaps touch impossibility, which here is something like the sublime. Which isn't a call for fantasy exactly, but for pushing to the outer limits of experience. In the narrative, this finds its locus in a narrator crossing a snow-storm in a sick and exalted state, bent on reaching his (he believes) dead lover, if it kills him. Bataille would seem to say that life doesn't get any better, or at least any more significant, than that probably somewhat illusory or unnecessary struggle. He couldn't say for sure that he's wrong on that. And the urgency the narrator, and Bataille, feel in this totally comes through. It becomes the reader's urgency, theory embodied. The latter two sections seem to draw these principles into greater theoretical and poetic abstraction, but the bright flame of the first illuminates and permeates all three.

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost stopped reading it after about 20 pages in, because the whole 'God', 'longing', 'desire', 'death' pattern reminded me of 'Story of the Eye' (and I've only just read that a couple days ago). But then when 'Epilogue' (of Dianus) came about followed by chunks of poetry shoved in - I was hooked back in.

"Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the know within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in the blinding colors, in the image of the sun."

I've read Bataille's poetry in (if I'm not wrongly remembering this) 'The Bataille Reader' before - a long while ago. I don't remember enjoying it very much, but I really like them in this one. My favourite part of the book obviously being 'The Oresteia'.

"But in the night, desire tells lies and in this way night ceases to be its object. The existence led by me "in the night" resembles that of the lover at the death of his beloved, of Orestes learning of Hermione's suicide. In the form that night takes, existence cannot recognize "what it anticipated"."

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read through this almost in one sitting, unable to put it down. Now it seems to have left me, but it needs to be reread anyways. Also, best use of Hegelian influence.

[Keith [on semi hiatus] · Rating 5 out of 5]

A number of references to various influences such as Edgar Allen Poe, Gérard de Nerval, Søren Kierkegaard, and just like his book on Eroticism, the Thousand and One Nights gets another mention. A lot more philosophy and a select amount of erotica in the stories but wrapped in a poetic manner, something I was surprised to see and that was pulled off so well.

I went into this expecting something different, not entirely different what with assuming some things because of the fact Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena get a mention on the back cover, but it was a good surprise.

I'm now awaiting the biography in the post, I placed an order on AbeBooks in late May, it's coming from the US, some strange goings-on according to the tracking code... I really can't wait for it.

[Michael A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A narrative in which Bataille destroys logic with the "non-sense" and "madness" of poetry, which in itself contains the possible within the impossible. I couldn't quite piece together the story fully, but it's almost like everyone is the same person but different facets of personalities, though I'm not sure. I believe Dianus and Alpha (D. and A.) are the same person, Dianus being a pretty big hint (another name for Janus, two-faced God) and how A. refers to D. as his brother, etc. I think E. and B. are the same person too but I'm also not sure. And then in the third part there's dark, minimalist poems dealing with death/desire (of course, it's Bataille). At the very end there are a few meditations on poetry that I think are very good.

It has the same style as his Summa Atheological trilogy (inner experience/guilty/on nietzsche), except it is "fiction" and not Bataille's journal. But who knows, really.

[Jeffrey Bumiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will admit that some of this went right over my head, but it looked so pretty flying by. This book is sufficiently morbid and perverse, a quick read, a captivating read. My favorite moments came in the final section which consists of sparse poetry:

The night is my nudity
the stars are my teeth
I throw myself among the dead
dressed in white sunlight

[Nati Korn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm shouting: The king is naked

(naked = death = impossible desire = sex = unreachable = unspeakable = unwritable = night = pain)

Add a considerable amount of boredom, obscure logic and contempt for reason and rationality.

A few clever poetic images,

That about sums it up.

[aya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely incredible. The necessity to reach the limit, the impossible to truly take advantage of freedom. beautiful, insane, perfectly logical. fuck man. it's good.

[Johannes Lilover · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times hard to understand. But eye enjoyed the Rimbaudish style and the rat to page ratio wasn't horrible either.

[Tomas Serrien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bataille's goal is to use poetic and obscene language to push the reader to the limits of experience/imagination, to make it ‘transgress’. In this bundle of short stories, he certainly succeeds in this at times by evoking horror and fear, by breaking logic and firing off a quasi-psychotic verbiage that feels haunting at best, but pretty boring at worst. His sentences are at times so unreadable and mystical with constant references to death and destruction that it becomes a kind of gimmick that doesn't really touch me much in terms of content because he totally lost me with his incoherent narratives. For now, Stephen King's masterwork Misery works much more transgressively by all means because it serves a coherent story with a fucked up content, but I have not yet read Bataille’s infamous debut ‘The History of the Eye’… so maybe it can change…

[Alex Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

By playing with desires, and people are nodal points, (letters and genders, but not names or identities), Bataille explores areas of desire and loss, sculpting a body of agony. This agony always finds release however, when desire is locked away and pulled apart from itself so as to be inarticulate. He manages to find a way to twist it a bit further, so that each node knows another by dominance, servitude and love. These middling complexities are glimpses of the intimacy each knew another by, so that their absence was in itself a union. It is impossible that we live, as organisms, as differences in consciousness and configuration can recognize each other and become adapted to one another's presence that without them, we are nothing but less than ourselves. This is also not to say how their relationships can affect us too, so that our sense of self is our sense of another -- a very specific other.

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

"- What is this? It is a cat, sitting on a chair. This cat, who we may refer to as 'Felis Catus' if we wanted to be grandiose - cares not for itself. Nor does it care for its environment. It knows its on a chair; it knows it's on a chair, in a warmly lit lounge with two other people. One of them is cooking - but the cat doesn't care. The other one, she might be staring into space... the cat takes no notice. For the cat lives in its own reality, impervious to that which goes on around it. What does it think about? That's none of our business."

I know there will be resounding shocks of surprise and dismay when I reveal that this quote is not one of Bataille's, it instead belongs to the bastard who defaced my copy of the book.

There is something about Bataille's work that brings out a temptation in people to dawdle around the subject matter, writing innocuous messages and non-academic notes in the non-spaces that litter the border of the pages. This is a somnolence where the daily business of errands, and what Bataille would describe as the world of utility, tends to drift up and effectively distract a person from the sheer incomprehensibility of what Bataille is attempting to pin down. Ever the hedgehog thinker (never the fox), we are once again in the realm of laceration, anguish, chance, transgression, irony, joy, nakedness, absence, and indifference. And what the fuck does it all mean? And more importantly, what the bloody hell is even occurring plot-wise?

OK OK, of course the latter doesn't really matter - with Bataille, we're sketching a profane psychogeography. Like K., he approaches the Castle, but the castle itself as a physical place is a figurehead, a signifier, of an inner striving against a paranoid and wispy persecution, an aching and throbbing desire which is ever impotent. In fact, he even has his narrator say, "Letting myself go, forgetting myself, like a dead man, inert in my sheets, the question 'What is happening?' had the gaiety of a slap in the face".

In the worst possible ways, and to indulge in a touch of megalomania for a moment, Georges in this book reminds me a lot of my own writing - I'm certain if he was around today this book would have been amassed out of the excreta of his Notes app. Aphorisms are linked together sparsely as our narrator is repulsed and attracted by events, orbiting this hysterically desirable woman named B., and as the plot itself disperses in a final funereal consummation between a widow in prostrate grief and a convalescent, scarcely coherent man, Bataille emerges virtually out of nowhere with a minimalist poetics, sketching objects and human processes drenched and sodden by the solemnity of his tears. As a matter of fact, I think these poems are, and I'll use the technical term, shit. In my mind Bataille is far better suited in a quasi-philosophical mode where he struggles to keep pace with a hazy state of affairs, but I've seen a number of reviews holding this up to be the best part of the book - different strokes....

And now some quotes - I myself am impotent when it comes to my own writing ability in being able to properly sell the piece. But it is worth reading, just to be able to stand back at the end and stare with an elevated sense of incomprehension at the jagged whole, before quickly darting in some dingy alleyway and savouring disparate fragments with the ferocity of some starved and barely sentient child.

"I write the way a child cries: a child slowly relinquishes the reasons he has for being in tears."

"The possibility of a fall is disturbing, but the anxiety redoubles if the prospect, instead of repelling, finds an involuntary complicity in the one it frightens: the fascination of vertigo is basically only a desire that is obscurely undergone. The same is true of the excitation of the senses. If one strips naked the part of a pretty young woman going from halfway up the leg to the waist, desire vivifies an image of the possible that nakedness points to. There are those who remain insensible and likewise one is not necessarily subject to vertigo. The pure and simple desire for the abyss is scarcely conceivable; it's aim would be immediate death. But I can love the young woman stripped naked in front of me. If the abyss seems to me to answer my expectations, I immediately dispute the answer, while the lower belly of young women reveals an abysmal aspect only in the long run. It would not be an abyss if it were endlessly available, remaining true to itself, forever pretty, forever stripped naked by desire, and if, for my part, I had inexhaustible strength. But if it does not have the immediately dark character of a ravine, it is no less empty for that and leads to horror nonetheless."

(these next three paragraphs are of one section)

"In my calm an inner wail, from the depths of my solitude, shattered me. I was alone - a wail that no one heard, that no ears will ever hear.

What unimaginable force would my lamentation have had if there were a God?

'Think about it though. Nothing can escape you now. If God doesn't exist, this moan, choked back in your solitude, is the extreme limit of the possible: in this sense there is no element of the universe that is not under its power! It is not subject to anything, it dominates everything and yet is formed out of an infinite awareness of impotence: out of a sense of the impossible to be exact!'"

"Later at the window (at the moment when the unpredictable light of a lightning flash would reveal the expanse of the lake and the sky), I would like to address God with a false nose on my face."

[Carer Fanel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inaudito estado de nervios, irritación sin nombre; estar enamorado a tal punto es estar enfermo (y me gusta estar enfermo): De esta forma, Georges Bataille da inicio a una de sus tantas narraciones idílicas, donde él vierte, en demasía, su pensamiento filosófico, pero sobre todo, su potencia creadora y destructora de la racionalidad y la realidad humana. Sin duda, Lo Imposible es una obra donde Bataille, a través de una literatura con fórmulas poéticas, carcome al lenguaje y a su propia historia.

[Bob · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the beginning of this one. Kinduva love/hate triangle thing going on. But it kinda dribbled away for me. Bataille succeeded in making me care about the characters in the beginning, and not to care about them by the end. Well, I hope that's what he was going for!

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I seem to return to this book over and over especially during times of loss. It haunts me and now it has been many years and I need to reread it.

[Jimmy Hamzey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bataille's Pale Fire

[Justin Grimbol · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one pretentious book. But there is a lot of truth in it and it left an imprint on my eternally impressionable mind.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most beautiful texts ever written--la haine de la poesie!

[时间的玫瑰 · Rating 4 out of 5]

书里最多的两个词，“温柔”和“焦虑”。段位不够，很多地方看得我晕沉沉。但是美的句子和比喻是真的很美。“我接近诗了：却是为了错过它。”

[Y. N. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Поезията не е самопознание, още по-малко е преживяване на някаква възможна далечина (на онова, което преди това не е било), а обикновеното припомняне с думи на недостъпни възможности."

[Ehsan]

The winds have ruffled my assassin hair.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

sincera sa fiu nu a fost nimic nou de la Bataille, aceeasi poezie si aceleasi idei, dar evident asta nu ma deranjeaza pentru ca tot ce imi doream de la cartea asta era sa mai citesc o bucatica din ce a scris doar pentru ca imi era dor…

prima fraza “Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick)” si ma gandeam deja asta e pentru mine, asta e ce astept eu de la Bataille. Evident am avut parte de siropeli de genul in continuare si mi-a placut foarte mult pentru ca sunt cam delulu.

Plotul era gen ??? adica e o colectie inteleg ca nu trebuie sa aiba un plot dar daca va povestesc suna de parca a scris o fantezie de a lui doar de dragul de a scrie niste fraze frumoase (foarte posibil) si de asta ii ofer 3 stelute, o experienta foarte placuta pentru fani, dar nu a excelat.

[Cobertizo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick Land estuvo aquí:

"Esas ratas que nos salen de los ojos como si viviéramos en una tumba... A tiene la fuerza y el carácter de una rata: problema aun más alarmante puesto que no se sabe el dónde sale y a dónde va.
Esa región de las muchachas que va de la rodilla a la cintura y que responde violentamente a la espera, nos responde como el inaprehensible pasaje de una rata. Lo que nos fascina es vertiginoso: la insípidez, los repliegues y la cloaca tienen la misma esencia ilusoria que el vacío de un abismo en el que se va a caer. El vacío también me atrae, si no no tendría vértigo -pero muero si caigo; ¿y qué otra cosa puedo hacer en un vacío sino caer en él?- si sobreviviera a la caída, verificaría la innanidad del deseo"

[Nathan Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is, effectively, two novellas accompanied by a selection is poetry that all feeds into the same story of eroticism. It is an extremely dense read, and is loaded with sentences that run on as though the writer is as equally possessed by a madness that seems to compel many of the characters in the story.

When taken as totally individual pieces, the work is much less, but in combination, this work is an oddly compelling read, though you need to approach the book with well fitted nihilism goggles. The weight on your chest equals the weight on your mind after this.

[Gavin Fryer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. This is my first time reading his poetry. I enjoyed much of it, I did not like the last poem in this collection though "To Be Orestes". I appreciate how thematically consistent of a writer he was now. This makes me want to return to his theory of religion which I have wrestled with many times.

[rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 star banger if not for the middle slump. philosophy as narrative inner monolog & disastrous desire and possession. the final bit is on writing poetry is actually helpful and i feel my own writing swing hard into a reverie with bataille or even david gascoyne—influential night, hello!

[T Brown]

A woman and the removal of her dress really inspired this entire book. He talked about desire that was rather romantic and deeply surreal at moments and then he would ramble and it came off as a drunk mess. Especially at the end...what are we talking about, Bataille?

[Ryan Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible book