GEORGES BATAILLE
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Inner Experience.
"The self-acknowledged
suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book."1a*
"We have in fact
only
two certainties in this world ' that we are not everything and
that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one
is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic,
an unbreathable void reveals itself. . . The mind moves in a
strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist."1b*
"By
inner experience
I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience:
the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion.
. .
"
. . . Inner experience responds to the necessity in
which I find myself -- human existence with me -- of
challenging everything (of putting everything into
question) without permissible rest."1c*
SANTAYANA
"The development of
intelligence leads to a drying up of life which, in return, has
narrowed intelligence. It is only if I state this principle:
'inner experience itself is authority', that I emerge from this
impotence. Intelligence has destroyed the authority necessary for
experience: by deciding the issue in this way, man has once again
at his disposal his 'possible' and what is no longer the old, the
limited, but the extreme limit of the possible.
" . . . 'One must grasp the meaning from the inside.' . . .
One must
live experience."1d
KIERKEGAARD
SANTAYANA
"
. . . [T]he essence of my self
arises from this ' that nothing will be able to replace it:
the feeling of my fundamental improbability situates me in the
world where I remain as though foreign to it, absolutely foreign."1e
"Among the rights which
man claims for himself, he forgets that of being stupid; he is
necessarily stupid, but without the right to be so, and sees
himself forced to dissimulate."1f*
"Knowledge is in no way
distinct from me: I am it, it is the existence
which I am."1g
HEIDEGGER
"There
is in understanding a blind spot: which is
reminiscent of the structure of the eye."1h
"Man can
find himself
only on the condition of escaping, without rest, from the
avarice
which grips him."1i*
"Often
the unknown gives us anguish, but it is the
condition for ecstasy. Anguish is the fear of
losing, expression of the desire to possess."1j
KIERKEGAARD
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The Absence of
Myth: Writings on Surrealism.
" . . .
[T]he absence of myth is also
a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true myth."2a
"[Surrealism]
is genuinely virile opposition ' nothing
conciliatory, nothing divine ' to all accepted limits, a
vigorous will to insubordination."2b
"Liberty is no longer the liberty to
choose, but the choice renders a liberty, a free
activity, possible, requiring that once decision is fixed upon it
I do not allow a new choice to intervene, for a choice between the
diverse possibilities of the activity unleashed would be made with
a view to some ulterior result (this is the significance of
automatism). . ."2c
"
. . . [T]oday's
man defines himself by his avidity for myth, and if we add that he
defines himself also by the consciousness of not having the power
to gain access to the possibility of creating a true myth, we have
defined a sort of myth which is the
absence of myth."2d
"Omophagia, that
form of sacrifice in which the victim is devoured alive
by the unrestrained participants, is doubtless the most
complete image of the sacred, implying as it
always does an element of horror and
criminality. . .
The sacred demands the violation of what is normally
the object of terrified respect. Its domain is that of
destruction and death."2e
"Without the sacred, the
totality of the plenitude of being escapes man; he would no longer
be anything but incomplete."2f
"Liberty is nothing if it is not
fully making use of the present moment (am I free, in
that I have something to do?). I am free as I live in
immediacy, for a now and not for a
later."2g
"The horse is taken out of the stable to
the abattoir . . . For the butcher it becomes a quantity of meat
worth so much a kilo . . . in the butcher's eyes a horse is
already dead (has become meat, an object). In the world of the
instant nothing is dead, absolutely nothing . . . No more
difference, no calculation to make: the stillness of the
lake . . . where happiness thinks about nothing . .
.
"2h
"Normally, the only thing apparent in
the life of the great and of kings is crime . . . at
the very least, abuse of power and
exploitation of the weak to the advantage of vested
interests."2i
"
. . . [S]urrealism
. . . does not mean 'language beyond words' but rather,
'language
beyond things' . . . Things are what they are only because
of the meaning words give them."2j
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*
Italics in the original.
1 Georges Bataille
(1897-1962). Inner Experience.
Translated, with an Introduction, by Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1988. (Originally
published as L'Experience Interieure,
Editions Gallimard, 1954.)
PREFACE
a Preface, at xxxii.
b Ibid., at xxxii.
PART ONE: Sketch of an Introduction to Inner
Experience
c I. Critique of dogmatic
servitude (and of mysticism), at 3.
d II. Experience, sole
authority, sole value, at 8.
PART THREE: Antecedents to the Torment (or
the Comedy)
e Death is in a sense an
imposture, at 69.
f The labyrinth (or the
constitution of beings), at 81.
PART FOUR: Post-Scriptum to the Torment (or
the New Mystical Theology)
g III. Hegel, at 110.
h Ibid., at 110.
i VI. Nietzsche, at 134.
j
Ibid., at 146.
2 Georges Bataille.
The Absence of
Myth: Writings on Surrealism.
Edited,
translated and introduced by Michael Richardson. Translation
and Introduction, Michael Richardson, 1994. London, UK:
Verso, 2006. (From Georges Bataille,
Oeuvres compl'tes,
Editions Gallimard, 1976-1988.)
a The Absence of Myth, at 48.
b On the Subject of Slumbers,
at 49.
c Surrealism and How it
Differs from Existentialism, at 66.
d The Surrealist Religion, at
81.
e War and the Philosophy of
the Sacred, at 117.
f Poetry and the Temptation
pf the End of the World, at 122.
g From the Stone Age to
Jacques Pr'vert, at 142.
h Ibid., at 150.
i The Age of Revolt, at 172.
j Surrealism and God, at 182.
MK-BOOKS-BATAILLE-20080510.
UPDATED 20080511.
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