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Acéphale
In 1936, at the height of the anti-fascist struggle, French Surrealist Georges Bataille and his closest friends took leave of the revolutionary milieu to form a fanatically religious secret society under the symbol of the acéphale – a headless figure clutching a fiery heart and a sacrificial knife. Their conspiracy was to achieve headlessness at every level: the headless society, the human being freed from reason, the defeat of the three-headed monster of Fascism-Christianity-Socialism, the ecstatic rupture of the Dionsyian frenzy, and the literal beheading of Bataille himself. This is their journal, fully (re)translated and compiled in English for the first time.
163 pages, Paperback
First published January 21, 1937
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About the author
Georges Bataille
232 books2,516 followersFrench 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.
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August 23, 2021The collected issues with a great intro from Contagion Press on the relevance of the essays to contemporary anarchists (or post-anarchists?), and an emphasis on the relevance of Dionysus to the group's aims. I don't care much for the content of the journals themselves, and view the whole project of founding an atheistic political theology as totally wrongheaded, but it's a nice presentation of the French reception of Nietzsche in the interwar period.
I am always confounded and disturbed when I meet people with religious sentimentalities like Bataille's. Once I had the pleasure of speaking with a Christian communist on the structural similarities between Christian and Marxist eschatology. Whereas I found their similarities to be a source of distress--politics corrupted by a religious myth which I found dangerous--my friend found it to be a source of excitement--politics mirrored by the religious myth he claimed as his own. These days I don't think religion and politics can ever be divorced, for better or for worse, hence my interest in political theology.
While I don't think that philosophy can do away with God--or with God's many-headed corpses, for that matter (whether you call it Being, Nous, Nature, the groundless ground, or whatever)--I think the most interesting path available to it is to found existence on a God which mirrors its own condition--a destitute and structurally incomplete God. Instead of replacing a transcendent totality with an immanent totality, as grand utopian political projects aim to do, postulating an absolute which is destitute exposes every attempt to grasp existence in its totality as an impossibility motivated by a phantasmatic desire which can neither be realized nor thought or wished away, but which, like a lure, draws us towards a horizon which recedes as we approach it. If Acéphale can teach anything, it's a lesson on the seductive power of desire--and a further lesson that no critique which reveals the lure as a ruse can exorcise its ghost. If we are condemned to be haunted by utopian dreams, let us not be possessed by them, and let's seek to understand, if we can, what motivates them as well as us. If reason is the parent of nihilism, let's not desire madness but learn to inhabit our desolate condition and live it as our meaning. And if God is dead, let's not seek to revive an echo of God's form in our earthly flesh or in reverence for Greek mystery cults, but celebrate the ways in which the loss of God mirrors our own loss...
On the other side of what Walter Benjamin derisively calls "left-wing melancholy" lies the recognition that, contra Freud, the lost object which haunts the subject of melancholy inhabits an irretrievably ancestral past--what Merleau-Ponty (and Derrida many years later), following Kierkegaard, describes as "a past which has never been present." If we are prevented from ascending into the garden of Eden, perhaps it is because we were never granted entry in the first place. Mortal exiles, no political program or religious sentiment can restore what we never had--most attempts that begin with this aim in mind end with a nihilistic call to either destroy the world through apocalyptic violence or abandon the world through contemplative withdrawal, and only end up encountering once again that emptiness which they sought to forestall. Neither can the psychotherapeutic promise of "working through" our grief salve our wounds. But "working through" *might* help us to incorporate grief into the essence of who we are, so that it no longer appears as a crisis to be solved but an atmosphere within which we live. By anticipating our own disillusion with whatever ideals we may take for ourselves, we may be able to learn a new way of relating to them, this time in the mode of a guiding metaphor rather than as an ideal future to be literally realized. Although I am not a Nietzschean, such a sentiment might be closer to amor fati than any serious utopian left-revolutionary project: to cultivate some love for irony and tragedy, to learn to laugh at one's dreams and failures, to learn the art of transforming suffering into its opposite--not through abjection, which always fails, and usually with grave consequences for others, but through incorporation. And while this might fail, too, if you've set yourself up to expect failure, then its arrival should be of no surprise, and could even offer some blessings.
Ultimately, I think Nietzsche's philosophy suffers from a hatred of weakness--perhaps, to take a page from his book, for reasons having to do with his own tormented physiology--and this poses serious problems for any thorough attempt to combine his thought with egalitarian politics, even in an individualistic, post-anarchist, "anti-political" form. But if one rejects Nietzsche's imperative to transcend weakness through overcoming, and instead embraces weakness and vulnerability as the *foundation* of will to power, then I think Nietzsche's thought becomes more interesting. And such a betrayal of his philosophy might, in the end, remain faithful to it, since “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
Regarding the book's endorsement of abandoning our heads for the sake of being consumed by Dionysian ecstasy, I think that, once again, it needs to be tempered a bit. Leaving aside the worry that there's some inescapable hypocrisy and naivete in yearning for madness (and there is, but owing to consciousness' self-division, a certain amount of hypocrisy and naivete is inescapable), the movement from what is portrayed as the burden of a stultifying instrumental reason to a liberating communal ecstasy is largely one-sided. At least one essay argued that Nietzsche's madness represented the incarnation of his philosophy; and since the members of Acephale positively worshiped Nietzsche, the author calls for readers to follow in Nietzsche's footsteps and become mad, thereby realizing a cosmic fidelity to ancient Dionysian mystery cults and Heraclitean physis. While there's much to be said about the occult roots of ancient Greek philosophy, and the relationship between philosophy and religious sentiment more generally, there are loads of ways to get your religious kicks in *besides* madness alone. A little bit of madness here and there can be a great thing, but the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose; and besides, I think that framing the problem as a duel between madness and reason, or science and religion is just too simple. Reason can be its own form of madness, and science has been a religious project from the start. I dunno, I think that meditation, little magic rituals, games, and other mind-altering activities can be both fun and enriching, but I'm not dying to take drugs with my friends and tear each other apart limb from limb. And apparently, neither was anyone in Acephale--but they liked to write about it. I'm reminded of one of Cioran's aphorisms about how he chose to stay alive because if he had ever actually killed himself, he would have deprived himself of the pleasure of his despair. I think that Bataille and friends realized this eventually, but it required that the dissolution of the group and an admission of their failure. But hey, at least Bataille kept writing bad surrealist porn afterwards. It's just like Gillian Welch sings: "We all get to heaven in our own sweet time."
I am always confounded and disturbed when I meet people with religious sentimentalities like Bataille's. Once I had the pleasure of speaking with a Christian communist on the structural similarities between Christian and Marxist eschatology. Whereas I found their similarities to be a source of distress--politics corrupted by a religious myth which I found dangerous--my friend found it to be a source of excitement--politics mirrored by the religious myth he claimed as his own. These days I don't think religion and politics can ever be divorced, for better or for worse, hence my interest in political theology.
While I don't think that philosophy can do away with God--or with God's many-headed corpses, for that matter (whether you call it Being, Nous, Nature, the groundless ground, or whatever)--I think the most interesting path available to it is to found existence on a God which mirrors its own condition--a destitute and structurally incomplete God. Instead of replacing a transcendent totality with an immanent totality, as grand utopian political projects aim to do, postulating an absolute which is destitute exposes every attempt to grasp existence in its totality as an impossibility motivated by a phantasmatic desire which can neither be realized nor thought or wished away, but which, like a lure, draws us towards a horizon which recedes as we approach it. If Acéphale can teach anything, it's a lesson on the seductive power of desire--and a further lesson that no critique which reveals the lure as a ruse can exorcise its ghost. If we are condemned to be haunted by utopian dreams, let us not be possessed by them, and let's seek to understand, if we can, what motivates them as well as us. If reason is the parent of nihilism, let's not desire madness but learn to inhabit our desolate condition and live it as our meaning. And if God is dead, let's not seek to revive an echo of God's form in our earthly flesh or in reverence for Greek mystery cults, but celebrate the ways in which the loss of God mirrors our own loss...
On the other side of what Walter Benjamin derisively calls "left-wing melancholy" lies the recognition that, contra Freud, the lost object which haunts the subject of melancholy inhabits an irretrievably ancestral past--what Merleau-Ponty (and Derrida many years later), following Kierkegaard, describes as "a past which has never been present." If we are prevented from ascending into the garden of Eden, perhaps it is because we were never granted entry in the first place. Mortal exiles, no political program or religious sentiment can restore what we never had--most attempts that begin with this aim in mind end with a nihilistic call to either destroy the world through apocalyptic violence or abandon the world through contemplative withdrawal, and only end up encountering once again that emptiness which they sought to forestall. Neither can the psychotherapeutic promise of "working through" our grief salve our wounds. But "working through" *might* help us to incorporate grief into the essence of who we are, so that it no longer appears as a crisis to be solved but an atmosphere within which we live. By anticipating our own disillusion with whatever ideals we may take for ourselves, we may be able to learn a new way of relating to them, this time in the mode of a guiding metaphor rather than as an ideal future to be literally realized. Although I am not a Nietzschean, such a sentiment might be closer to amor fati than any serious utopian left-revolutionary project: to cultivate some love for irony and tragedy, to learn to laugh at one's dreams and failures, to learn the art of transforming suffering into its opposite--not through abjection, which always fails, and usually with grave consequences for others, but through incorporation. And while this might fail, too, if you've set yourself up to expect failure, then its arrival should be of no surprise, and could even offer some blessings.
Ultimately, I think Nietzsche's philosophy suffers from a hatred of weakness--perhaps, to take a page from his book, for reasons having to do with his own tormented physiology--and this poses serious problems for any thorough attempt to combine his thought with egalitarian politics, even in an individualistic, post-anarchist, "anti-political" form. But if one rejects Nietzsche's imperative to transcend weakness through overcoming, and instead embraces weakness and vulnerability as the *foundation* of will to power, then I think Nietzsche's thought becomes more interesting. And such a betrayal of his philosophy might, in the end, remain faithful to it, since “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
Regarding the book's endorsement of abandoning our heads for the sake of being consumed by Dionysian ecstasy, I think that, once again, it needs to be tempered a bit. Leaving aside the worry that there's some inescapable hypocrisy and naivete in yearning for madness (and there is, but owing to consciousness' self-division, a certain amount of hypocrisy and naivete is inescapable), the movement from what is portrayed as the burden of a stultifying instrumental reason to a liberating communal ecstasy is largely one-sided. At least one essay argued that Nietzsche's madness represented the incarnation of his philosophy; and since the members of Acephale positively worshiped Nietzsche, the author calls for readers to follow in Nietzsche's footsteps and become mad, thereby realizing a cosmic fidelity to ancient Dionysian mystery cults and Heraclitean physis. While there's much to be said about the occult roots of ancient Greek philosophy, and the relationship between philosophy and religious sentiment more generally, there are loads of ways to get your religious kicks in *besides* madness alone. A little bit of madness here and there can be a great thing, but the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose; and besides, I think that framing the problem as a duel between madness and reason, or science and religion is just too simple. Reason can be its own form of madness, and science has been a religious project from the start. I dunno, I think that meditation, little magic rituals, games, and other mind-altering activities can be both fun and enriching, but I'm not dying to take drugs with my friends and tear each other apart limb from limb. And apparently, neither was anyone in Acephale--but they liked to write about it. I'm reminded of one of Cioran's aphorisms about how he chose to stay alive because if he had ever actually killed himself, he would have deprived himself of the pleasure of his despair. I think that Bataille and friends realized this eventually, but it required that the dissolution of the group and an admission of their failure. But hey, at least Bataille kept writing bad surrealist porn afterwards. It's just like Gillian Welch sings: "We all get to heaven in our own sweet time."
June 25, 2021
What had the face of politics and imagined itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement. Kierkegaard’s prophecy is taken as the epigraph of the Acéphale journal and as the sacred task of the corresponding secret society. The College of Sociology is the third and most public layer of the new initiative Georges Bataille undertakes in April 1936. It is a decisive and paradoxical moment. At the very height of the anti-fascist struggle, Bataille turns his back on politics and leaves Contre-Attaque, the combat union of revolutionary intellectuals he has only just formed together with Claude Cahun, André Breton, and others. In the same moment, he dedicates himself completely to the secret society under the sign of the acéphale, a headless figure who has come to him in dream and trance as much as in his study of ancient art, who is starry-breasted, labyrinthine of belly and has the face of death for its reproductive organs, who clutches the knife of sacrifice in its left hand and the sacred heart in its right, and whose appearance signs the dramatic break with even the most revolutionary forms of political struggle.
Up to this point, Bataille has torched through a series of ever more revolutionary groups and cannot find his home in any; he has earned the accolade of heretic from the anarchists and communists alike. But this new group – possessed, as he puts it, of a purely religious purpose – is not a renunciation of struggle, does not signal any laying down of arms or retreat into comfort. It is said that a person’s name carries the secret signature of his fate, and Bataille, whose very name is battle, cannot renounce combat any more than he can escape his destiny. Violence and aggression are one with the free play that is life. It is politics, like the Christianity it is based on, that seeks to nullify and control this instinct, to infect life with moral reasoning and turn it against itself. What we are starting, Bataille writes, is a war. A war at a higher level, freed from the falsehoods of politics, waged at the level of the sacred. Anti-fascist, anti-Christian, and anti-Socialist, for these are not three different things but three different heads of the same monster. As Michel Camus put it in his introduction to the 1980 French facsimile edition of Acéphale, Bataille’s “political passion turned less to apoliticism than by some ‘religious’ means to the most virulent anti-politics.”
For Camus, this hostility to the politics of left and right alike provokes only bafflement. But we find a strong resonance here. The anti-political spirit has blazed through our worlds in recent decades, finding fuel in circles of post-left and green anarchists and anti-state communists, which can be seen as later iterations of the revolutionary groups Bataille frequented until the break with Contre-Attaque. To be sure, not everyone touched by anti-political fever will find her way into a cult, but some, just as surely, will. And while it would be foolish to see Acéphale as a model to follow, how could we not gaze into the rough and imperfect mirror it offers?
The mirror shows us Acéphale: the religion of madness. This is the meaning of the headless figure, as Bataille makes clear in “The Sacred Conspiracy.” We must escape our heads like prisoners their prisons. If you would sever yourself from the world of politics, aim precisely at the neck... Abandon the world of the civilized and its light, Bataille urges. It is too late to be reasonable and learned. The world of secular modernity remains hopelessly enslaved to the head, forcing us to a life void of ecstasy, a life not worth living. Below the neck lies an awakened world, beckoning us to carry out the greatest of jailbreaks. Revolutionaries are just more jailers.
If Acéphale is the religion of madness, it is also the religion of the Earth... In the mountains, fires rise up and burst forth: beneath its crust, the Earth is another star. In Masson’s sketches, the acéphale and the god Dionysos are accompanied by earthquake and volcanic eruption. Indeed, it is in volcanic soil that the grape vines sacred to Dionysos thrive, for Dionysos – born of Earth and lightning – is the fire of the earth, the god who reveals that the Earth is, like every living being, another star. Earth, in the acephalic religion, is not ground, it is not constancy, it is the sign of utter flux and ungroundedness: precisely that which we consider ground becomes a crust upon the surface of a burning sun. Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sideways, forward, in all directions?
Acéphale is the Nietzschean religion, quite possibly the largest group yet formed on explicitly Nietzschean principles... But how is it possible? A Nietzschean religion, a religion under the name of the great atheist who preached the death of God? A century of musty scholarship has obscured the matter. The journal’s writings on Nietzsche uncover a long trail of overlooked writings, a labyrinthine path not deist so much as deifying and undeifying. It is nothing less than a resurrection of the truly ancient philosophy. That the earliest Greek philosophers all admitted to have learned their art in Egypt at the feet of the philosopher-priests for whom philosophy was a divine art – this fact has been nearly erased from the philosophical tradition... As often happens, much of the English-speaking difficulty with the doctrine has turned on a difficulty of translation. Nietzsche’s thought has often been reduced to mere atheism because of Zarathustra’s famous doctrine of the death of God, but Zarathustra brings these tidings as a precursor for the more radical doctrine, which is that human beings are something that must be overcome. This is the doctrine of the superhumans, which is well known, though not by this name. Most modern translators, following Walter Kaufmann, render Nietzsche’s Übermensch as “overman” in order to avoid association with comic book superheroes and Nazi propaganda – and, what is probably a secondary concern, to keep Nietzsche’s wordplay around over and under. This translation choice has had its cost. The German noun Übermensch barely appears before Nietzsche; he essentially coined the term. But the German adjective/adverb übermeschlicht was in common use, and simply means superhuman. Nietzsche himself used this term several times in earlier writings before his Übermensch coinage. Much of the confusion around the idea of the Übermensch has come from failing to notice that Nietzsche’s vision of the overcoming of the human was something precisely superhuman or supernatural. Compellingly, Loeb and Tinsley point out that Nietzsche’s first use of the term Uebermenschen (an alternate spelling of Übermenschen) referred explicitly to the supernatural... It is through the death of God – even more, by killing God – that one encounters existence itself as an eternal becoming-god and unbecoming-god. In this Nietzschean formula, godliness is not supreme goodness, not supreme wisdom, it is nothing but will to power...
acephale.info
Up to this point, Bataille has torched through a series of ever more revolutionary groups and cannot find his home in any; he has earned the accolade of heretic from the anarchists and communists alike. But this new group – possessed, as he puts it, of a purely religious purpose – is not a renunciation of struggle, does not signal any laying down of arms or retreat into comfort. It is said that a person’s name carries the secret signature of his fate, and Bataille, whose very name is battle, cannot renounce combat any more than he can escape his destiny. Violence and aggression are one with the free play that is life. It is politics, like the Christianity it is based on, that seeks to nullify and control this instinct, to infect life with moral reasoning and turn it against itself. What we are starting, Bataille writes, is a war. A war at a higher level, freed from the falsehoods of politics, waged at the level of the sacred. Anti-fascist, anti-Christian, and anti-Socialist, for these are not three different things but three different heads of the same monster. As Michel Camus put it in his introduction to the 1980 French facsimile edition of Acéphale, Bataille’s “political passion turned less to apoliticism than by some ‘religious’ means to the most virulent anti-politics.”
For Camus, this hostility to the politics of left and right alike provokes only bafflement. But we find a strong resonance here. The anti-political spirit has blazed through our worlds in recent decades, finding fuel in circles of post-left and green anarchists and anti-state communists, which can be seen as later iterations of the revolutionary groups Bataille frequented until the break with Contre-Attaque. To be sure, not everyone touched by anti-political fever will find her way into a cult, but some, just as surely, will. And while it would be foolish to see Acéphale as a model to follow, how could we not gaze into the rough and imperfect mirror it offers?
The mirror shows us Acéphale: the religion of madness. This is the meaning of the headless figure, as Bataille makes clear in “The Sacred Conspiracy.” We must escape our heads like prisoners their prisons. If you would sever yourself from the world of politics, aim precisely at the neck... Abandon the world of the civilized and its light, Bataille urges. It is too late to be reasonable and learned. The world of secular modernity remains hopelessly enslaved to the head, forcing us to a life void of ecstasy, a life not worth living. Below the neck lies an awakened world, beckoning us to carry out the greatest of jailbreaks. Revolutionaries are just more jailers.
If Acéphale is the religion of madness, it is also the religion of the Earth... In the mountains, fires rise up and burst forth: beneath its crust, the Earth is another star. In Masson’s sketches, the acéphale and the god Dionysos are accompanied by earthquake and volcanic eruption. Indeed, it is in volcanic soil that the grape vines sacred to Dionysos thrive, for Dionysos – born of Earth and lightning – is the fire of the earth, the god who reveals that the Earth is, like every living being, another star. Earth, in the acephalic religion, is not ground, it is not constancy, it is the sign of utter flux and ungroundedness: precisely that which we consider ground becomes a crust upon the surface of a burning sun. Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sideways, forward, in all directions?
Acéphale is the Nietzschean religion, quite possibly the largest group yet formed on explicitly Nietzschean principles... But how is it possible? A Nietzschean religion, a religion under the name of the great atheist who preached the death of God? A century of musty scholarship has obscured the matter. The journal’s writings on Nietzsche uncover a long trail of overlooked writings, a labyrinthine path not deist so much as deifying and undeifying. It is nothing less than a resurrection of the truly ancient philosophy. That the earliest Greek philosophers all admitted to have learned their art in Egypt at the feet of the philosopher-priests for whom philosophy was a divine art – this fact has been nearly erased from the philosophical tradition... As often happens, much of the English-speaking difficulty with the doctrine has turned on a difficulty of translation. Nietzsche’s thought has often been reduced to mere atheism because of Zarathustra’s famous doctrine of the death of God, but Zarathustra brings these tidings as a precursor for the more radical doctrine, which is that human beings are something that must be overcome. This is the doctrine of the superhumans, which is well known, though not by this name. Most modern translators, following Walter Kaufmann, render Nietzsche’s Übermensch as “overman” in order to avoid association with comic book superheroes and Nazi propaganda – and, what is probably a secondary concern, to keep Nietzsche’s wordplay around over and under. This translation choice has had its cost. The German noun Übermensch barely appears before Nietzsche; he essentially coined the term. But the German adjective/adverb übermeschlicht was in common use, and simply means superhuman. Nietzsche himself used this term several times in earlier writings before his Übermensch coinage. Much of the confusion around the idea of the Übermensch has come from failing to notice that Nietzsche’s vision of the overcoming of the human was something precisely superhuman or supernatural. Compellingly, Loeb and Tinsley point out that Nietzsche’s first use of the term Uebermenschen (an alternate spelling of Übermenschen) referred explicitly to the supernatural... It is through the death of God – even more, by killing God – that one encounters existence itself as an eternal becoming-god and unbecoming-god. In this Nietzschean formula, godliness is not supreme goodness, not supreme wisdom, it is nothing but will to power...
acephale.info
February 28, 2022
A brilliant and long-overdue translation from a solid group of friends and anarchists. Towards headlessness!
November 23, 2007
Acéphale más que una revista francesa publicada por Georges Bataille y con colaboradores de la talla de Roger Caillois y Pierre Klossowski (hermano del pintor Balthus), es un recuento iniciático a los misterios de la ambiciosa sociedad secreta que lleva el mismo nombre.
En esta excelente primera edición en español se compilan y traducen íntegramente los contenidos de sus únicos cuatro números (El quinto en torno a la "locura" de Nietzsche nunca vio la luz), incluyendo las reproducciones completas de sus páginas originales.
Ineludible, si se desea compartir los atisbos fundamentales de algunas de las inteligencias más originales del siglo pasado.
Distribuido en México por Purpuramar, S.A.
Http://www.purpuramar.com
February 25, 2017
Just got this through special order! A reproduction of all the issues of Bataille's journal Acephale. Includes Masson's sketches, everything.
March 18, 2022
Los artículos publicados en la revista Acéphale fueron la cara "pública" de la sociedad secreta que formó Georges Bataille con un puñado de sus colaboradores. Aunque no se conocen las prácticas de esta sociedad, por lo que se alcanza a vislumbrar a través de estos artículos, se busca recuperar ese espíritu dionisiaco desterrado de la humanidad con la llegada del cristianismo y más tarde del racionalismo. De acuerdo a Bataille, el hombre se convirtió en esclavo, sumiso, y dejó a un lado su propia divinidad, la cual se encuentra oculta en el inconsciente, en la oscuridad del alma, en la pulsación de la carne y las pasiones.
A mi parecer, aquí se muestra más abiertamente la ideología de Bataille.
A mi parecer, aquí se muestra más abiertamente la ideología de Bataille.
July 6, 2021
En general lo más que me gustó era lo escrito por Bataille, algunos otros escritos no me parecieron tan interesantes o hasta entendibles. Leído muy lentamente. Edición en inglés por Contagion Press.
March 9, 2023
Nietzsche é coisa (muito) séria
Read
May 26, 2025Not overly impressed. My favorite Nietzsche fanboy is still a guy named Nick.
August 4, 2021
Humans will escape their heads like prisoners their prison. Revolutionary, religious, nietzschean, anti-fascist, meta-political, existential - a fascinating testimony of the aspirations of a particular group to realize the will, to escape their heads...
July 30, 2021
Read the clandestinely published version available from Contagion Press. Five stars for the production and resurrection of these old zines. Two or three for the content. I appreciate the creators' zeal and their anti-politics, very relevant today, but most of it reads more like theory than philosophy or a mythic-mystical text. And theory is almost invariably useless and nonsensical.
December 1, 2022
It's not the usual stuff I enjoy from Bataille and his associates, however, it nevertheless is an enjoyable work.
It's hard to rate it, as the part on Nietzsche and his supposed connection to Fascism is deserving of 4.5 stars. And also the final section of the book would deserve a similar rating.
The rest of the book definitely deserves 3 stars though.
Here's a cool quote:
"Joy before death" belongs only to the person for whom there is no beyond; it is the only flight of intellectual integrity that can follow the search for ecstasy.
How, moreover, can a beyond, how can God or anything resembling God, still be acceptable? No word is clear enough to express the happy contempt of the one who "dances with the time that kills him" toward those who take refuge in the expectation of eternal beatitude. This timid sort of holiness - which first had to be shel- tered from erotic excess - has now lost all its power: one can only laugh at a sacred intoxication that accorded with a “holy" horror of debauchery. Prudishness may be beneficial for the unfortunate, but anyone who would be afraid of naked girls and whiskey would have little to do with "joy before death.”
It is a shameless, indecent holiness that can lead to a sufficient- ly happy loss of self. "Joy before death" means that life can be glo- rified from root to summit. It deprives the sense from every in- tellectual or moral beyond, substance, God, immutable order or salvation. It is an apotheosis of the perishable, an apotheosis of the flesh and of alcohol as well as of the trances of mysticism. The religious forms it rediscovers are the naïve forms that precede the intrusion of slave morality: it renews the kind of tragic jubilation that human beings "are" when they cease to act like cripples: when they cease to glorify necessary work and let themselves be emasculated by the fear of tomorrow.
I also really like this one:
The sounds of struggle lose themselves in death like rivers in the sea, like the radiance of stars in the night.
It's hard to rate it, as the part on Nietzsche and his supposed connection to Fascism is deserving of 4.5 stars. And also the final section of the book would deserve a similar rating.
The rest of the book definitely deserves 3 stars though.
Here's a cool quote:
"Joy before death" belongs only to the person for whom there is no beyond; it is the only flight of intellectual integrity that can follow the search for ecstasy.
How, moreover, can a beyond, how can God or anything resembling God, still be acceptable? No word is clear enough to express the happy contempt of the one who "dances with the time that kills him" toward those who take refuge in the expectation of eternal beatitude. This timid sort of holiness - which first had to be shel- tered from erotic excess - has now lost all its power: one can only laugh at a sacred intoxication that accorded with a “holy" horror of debauchery. Prudishness may be beneficial for the unfortunate, but anyone who would be afraid of naked girls and whiskey would have little to do with "joy before death.”
It is a shameless, indecent holiness that can lead to a sufficient- ly happy loss of self. "Joy before death" means that life can be glo- rified from root to summit. It deprives the sense from every in- tellectual or moral beyond, substance, God, immutable order or salvation. It is an apotheosis of the perishable, an apotheosis of the flesh and of alcohol as well as of the trances of mysticism. The religious forms it rediscovers are the naïve forms that precede the intrusion of slave morality: it renews the kind of tragic jubilation that human beings "are" when they cease to act like cripples: when they cease to glorify necessary work and let themselves be emasculated by the fear of tomorrow.
I also really like this one:
The sounds of struggle lose themselves in death like rivers in the sea, like the radiance of stars in the night.
May 29, 2023
It's fitting that the anarchist printers, publishers and translators of this bootlegged printing of these issues of Acephale (headless) say they reject left and right statism, along with "the false opposition of the Christian religion versus the rationalist religion of equality, democracy, and civilization." For the political and literary refugees of Surrealism and postwar leftist organization laid out for themselves a program of creative destruction in this magazine that also served as a sacred text. Among their stated goals included realizing "the personal fulfillment of being in the irony of the animal world and through the revelation of an acephalic (headless) universe, one of play, not state or duty" and, simultaneously, "affirm the value of violence and the will to aggression insofar as they are the foundation of all power."
Creating a society devoted to play and personal fulfillment wasn't going to come from navel-gazing over the interpretation of dreams or rigid acquiescence of revolutionary dogma. Instead, the intellectual cult born of Bataille, Laure, Klossowski and their lot saw the need for a new religion of everyday life. Their first orders of business seem to have been to rehabilitate Nietzsche from the clutches of fascist ideology, in particular, his concept of Dionysian passion and excess as the basis for the revolutionary recreation of society.... And that's where the program seems to sputter out, retreading the same ground with slightly different interpretation in subsequent issues.
Creating a society devoted to play and personal fulfillment wasn't going to come from navel-gazing over the interpretation of dreams or rigid acquiescence of revolutionary dogma. Instead, the intellectual cult born of Bataille, Laure, Klossowski and their lot saw the need for a new religion of everyday life. Their first orders of business seem to have been to rehabilitate Nietzsche from the clutches of fascist ideology, in particular, his concept of Dionysian passion and excess as the basis for the revolutionary recreation of society.... And that's where the program seems to sputter out, retreading the same ground with slightly different interpretation in subsequent issues.
July 18, 2024
A very strong reading of Nietzsche. Certainly an attempt to contextualize his works through an leftist anarchist perspective. The themes of Dionysus as the penultimate role model, and madness achieved through knowledge are very relevant to anyone looking to have some kind of control within their own existence.
August 4, 2022
no he entendido muy bien de qué iba la secta pero el número 2 sobre Nietzsche es bastante interesante
January 1, 2023
a phenomenal English translation of a phenomenal work. a must have for anyone who has ever wanted to escape their head, or who has tripped into the earth and felt themselves erupt in its flames
December 3, 2025
Excelente facsímil con los contenidos de sus únicos cuatro números. Destacar, por supuesto, los textos de Bataille, que son los que encuentro más interesantes y originales.
June 26, 2024
While I have greatly appreciated Caillois' writings on the sacred and play, and on mimesis and insects, and I have appreciated Bataille's Summa Atheologica parts 1 and 2, and I love Andre Masson's paintings... This text was a huge disappointment for their pedantic and shallow readings of Nietzsche. There is nothing really transformative here. It's all idle talk.
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