Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Georges Bataille, fully Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille

French Intellectual working In Literature, Philosophy, Anthropology, Economics, Sociology and History of Art

"A lot of the universe seems honest; honest people have their eyes neutered. So they fear obscenity. They feel no anxiety when they hear the cry of the rooster or when they walk under a starry sky. When delivered 'to the pleasures of the flesh' do provided they are insipid."

"A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism."

"A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms."

"A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing."

"Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava)."

"An extreme, unconditional human yearning was expressed for the first time by Nietzsche independently of moral goals or of serving God. ? Ardor that doesn?t address a dramatically articulated moral obligation is a paradox. ? If we stop looking at states of ardor as simply preliminary to other and subsequent conditions grasped as beneficial, the state I propose seems a pure play of lightning, merely an empty consummation. Lacking any relation to material benefits such as power or the growth of the state (or of God or a Church or a party), this consuming can?t even be comprehended. ? I?ll have to face the same difficulties as Nietzsche?putting God and the good behind him, though all ablaze with the ardor possessed by those who lay down their lives for God or the good? I?ll admit that moral investigations that aim to surpass the good lead first of all to disorder."

"All eroticism has a sacramental character."

"An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being."

"Anyone wanting slyly to avoid suffering identifies with the entirety of the universe, judges each thing as if he were it. In the same way, he imagines, at bottom, that he will never die. We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, dis-intoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the dis-intoxicated is the subject of this book."

"And, writing to you, I know that I cannot speak to you, but there is no way of preventing myself from speaking. I am going abroad, as far away as possible, but everywhere I go I shall be in the same delirium, the same whether far from you or near, for the pleasure in me depends on no one, it emanates from me alone, from the imbalance in me which perpetually frays my nerves. You can see it for yourself, you aren?t the cause of it, I can do without you and I want you at a distance from me, but if you are involved, if it be a question of you, then I want to be in this delirium, I want you to behold it, I want it to destroy you."

"As for the sphere of thought, it is horror. Yes, it is horror itself."

"At man's core there is a voice that wants him never to give in to fear. But if it is true that in general man cannot give in to fear, at the very least he postpones indefinitely the moment when he will have to confront himself with the object of his fear... when he will no longer have the assistance of reason as guaranteed by God, or when he will no longer have the assistance of God such as reason guaranteed. It is necessary to recoil, but it is necessary to leap, and perhaps one only recoils in order to leap better."

"Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it."

"Being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)"

"By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical."

"But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond."

"Concern for this or that limited good can sometimes lead to the summit... But this occurs in a roundabout way. Moral ends ? are distinct from any excesses they occasion. States of glory and moments of sacredness surpass results intentionally sought."

"Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary."

"Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that specieas alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us."

"By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men's attention."

"Entirety exists within me as exuberance ... in empty longing ... in ... the desire to burn with desire."

"Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself."

"Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry."

"Eroticism is assenting to life even in death."

"Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a questioning of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death."

"Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning?and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is non-meaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action."

"Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities is no longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness, but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadvantage. Literature (fiction) took the place of what had formerly been the spiritual life; poetry (the disorder of words) that of real states of trance. Art constituted a small free domain, outside action: to gain freedom it had to renounce the real world. This is a heavy price to pay, and most writers dream of recovering a lost reality. They must then pay in another sense, by renouncing freedom."

"He continued questioning the limits of the world, seeing the misery of those who with them is formed, and could not stand for a long time how easy fiction: I demanded reality, I went crazy. If he lied, I was in the plane of poetry, a verbal overcoming the world. If a blind denigration persevered in the world, my denigration was false (as overcoming). In a way, my agreement with the world deepened. But unable to knowingly lie, I went crazy (able to ignore the truth). Or not already know, for myself, represent comedy delirium, I went crazy but inwardly. I lived the experience of the night Poetry just took a turn: I escaped by it in the world of speech, which for me had become the natural world, I entered her in a sort of tomb where the infinity of possible stemmed from the death of the logical world. When he died logic, gave birth crazy riches. But it is not possible evoked but unreal, the death of the logical world is unreal, everything is murky and elusive in the relative obscurity. I can make fun of myself and others: all reality is worthless, all value is unreal! Hence the ease and the fatality of landslides in which lie or do not know if I 'm crazy. The need of the night comes from this unfortunate situation. The night could not but deviate from it all. The question everything arose from the exasperation of a desire, let him could not plunge the vacuum! The object of my desire was, first , illusion and could not be more than second vacuum disappointment."

"Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death."

"From incoherent barkings of desire, man can advance to distinct speech now that, labelling the object with a name, he is able to make an implicit connection between the material it is made of and the work required to get it from the old state to the new in which it is ready for use. Thenceforth language firmly anchors the object in the stream of time."

"Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being. Should he in this fever have any apprehension whatsoever, he cannot say: ?I have seen God, the absolute, or the depths of the universe?; he can only say ?that which I have seen eludes understanding??and God, the absolute, the depths of the universe are nothing if they are not categories of the understanding. If I said decisively, ?I have seen God,? that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown?wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it?there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated."

"How cruel my suffering is,?no one is more talkative than I am!"

"For academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit."

"Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror"

"Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends."

"Human life, distinct from juridical existence, existing as it does on a globe isolated in celestial space, from night to day and from one country to another?human life cannot in any way be limited to the closed systems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions. The immense travail of recklessness, discharge, and upheaval that constitutes life could be expressed by stating that life starts with the deficit of these systems; at least what it allows in the way of order and reserve has meaning only from the moment when the ordered and reserved forces liberate and lose themselves for ends that cannot be subordinated to anything one can account for. It is only by such insubordination?even if it is impoverished?that the human race ceases to be isolated in the unconditional splendor of material things."

"Humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed in humanity-as-entirety."

"I Began to willfully indulge in dreams That, with the help of a bottle of wine, completely mad and Became Were close to being loathsome."

"I cannot exist entirely except when somehow I go beyond the stage of action. Otherwise I?m a soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a ?total human being.? The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and know what you have to do? You insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal?what?s normally called living? Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. I hold on to my nature as an entirety only by refusing to act?or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action."

"I have in my mind an obscenity so great that I could vomit the most dreadful words and it wouldn?t be enough!"

"I equate love (bodies touching indecently) to the limitlessness of being ? to nausea, to the sun, and to death."

"I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction."

"I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it."

"I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself."

"I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?"

"I felt as if i were living only in order to be more aware That I was dead."

"I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another."

"I teach the art of turning anguish into delight."

"I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it."

"I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night."