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Georges Bataille: 136 quotes5 likes

“The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.”

Georges Bataille

“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.”

Georges Bataille

Source: The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.”

Georges Bataille

Source: The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

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

Georges Bataille

Source: Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille

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“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”

Georges Bataille

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

Georges Bataille

Source: Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“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. I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: “I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep.” From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.”

Georges Bataille

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. xxxii

“Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).”

Georges Bataille

Source: The Impossible

“Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.”

Georges Bataille

Source: The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror”

Georges Bataille book Story of the Eye

Source: Story of the Eye

“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.”

Georges Bataille

“The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out.

Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.”

Georges Bataille

Source: The Impossible

“Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.”

Georges Bataille

Source: Literature and Evil

“We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.”

Georges Bataille

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”

Georges Bataille

Source: My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

“The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.”

Georges Bataille

Source: Theory of Religion

“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.
But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.
Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.”

Georges Bataille book The Solar Anus

The Solar Anus (1927)