Georges Bataille: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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, disintoxicated, 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 disintoxicated is the subject of this book.”

Georges Bataille

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

Life , Hate , Books , Way

“What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which generally isn’t true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxvi

“Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning—and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, 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.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxx

World

“To choose evil is to choose freedom—“freedom, emancipation from all restraint.””

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxxiv, note

Freedom , Evil

“The preceding criticism … justifies the following definition of the entire human: human existence as the life of “unmotivated” celebration, celebration in all meaning of the word: laughter, dancing, orgy, the rejection of subordination, and sacrifice that scornfully puts aside any consideration of ends, property, and morality.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxxii

Life , Laughter , Dance

“Inner experience, unable to have principles either in dogma (a moral attitude), or in science (knowledge can be neither its goal nor its origin), or in a search of enriching states (an experimental, aesthetic attitude), it cannot have any other concern nor other goal than itself. Opening myself to inner experience, I have placed in it all value and authority. Henceforth I can have no other value, no other authority (in the realm of mind). Value and authority imply the discipline of a method, the existence of a community.
I call experience a voyage to the end of the possible of man. Anyone may choose not to embark on this voyage, but if he does embark on it, this supposes the negation of the authorities, the existing values which limit the possible. By virtue of the fact that it is negation of other values, other authorities, experience, having a positive existence, becomes itself positively value and authority.
Inner experience has always had objectives other than itself in which one invested value and authority. … If God, knowledge, and suppression of pain were to cease to be in my eyes convincing objectives, … would inner experience from that moment seem empty to me, henceforth impossible without justification? …
I received the answer [from Blanchot]: experience itself is authority.”

Georges Bataille

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 7

God , Pain , Search , Communication

“Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.
I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.
The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.
The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.”

Georges Bataille book The Solar Anus

The Solar Anus https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-bataille-the-solar-anus
The Solar Anus (1927)

Love , Girl , Sun , Night

“The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge.”

Georges Bataille

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

Communication , Knowledge , Laughter

“Life is whole only when it isn’t subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxvii

Life , Way , Freedom

“It is through an “intimate cessation of all intellectual operations” that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency. … The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, … what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.”

Georges Bataille

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 13

“Inner experience … is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. … It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate.”

Georges Bataille

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 9

Intelligence , Appearance

“Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God’s person displaces the problem and does not abolish it.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xx

God , Problem , Thinking , Change

“Love expresses a need for sacrifice each unity must lose itself in some other which exceeds it. In erotic frenzy the being is led to tear itself apart and lose itself.”

Georges Bataille

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939

Love , Tear

“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, than 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.”

Georges Bataille

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 3

Understanding , Thinking

“The total person is first disclosed … in areas of life that are lived frivolously.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxix

Life , Personality

“There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.”

Georges Bataille

The Marquis de Sade, cited by Bataille in Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1962)

Death , Way

“We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.”

Georges Bataille

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 12

Knowledge

“The difficulty—that contestation must be done in the name of an authority—is resolved this: I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is.”

Georges Bataille

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 12

“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.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xx

Way

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

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxx