Wednesday, July 26, 2006
From the Introduction to The Bataille Reader, which Dirtnap & Osmosis so kindly sent to me:
Batailles texts could be subdivided under numerous disciplinary categories: literature, criticism, philosophy, art history, numismatics, history, anthropology, economy, sociology, eroticism, theology, among many others. While contesting and transgressing boundaries and styles of different disciplinesm Batailles nonetheless addresses, with rigour and consistency, the sacred elementals of erotic,mystical and economic activity so that his writing has been said, by Jean Baudrillard, to constitute "a single mythic thought" For Roland Barthes, Bataille exemplifies the excessive object called "Text"....
....the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a somple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), it's subversive force in respect to the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult that the literary manuals geerally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously on single text...
*
Bataille Quotes:
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.
*
Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species 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.
*
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.
*
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
*
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
*
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
*
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.
*
Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.
*
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.
*
Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.
*
Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.
*
The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.
*
The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
*
The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.
*
To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
*
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
