Georges Bataille: Use

“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

Life , Way , Knowledge , Thinking

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

Georges Bataille

Source: The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

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

Georges Bataille

Source: Literature and Evil

Future

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

Georges Bataille

Source: My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

“We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.”

Georges Bataille book Story of the Eye

Source: Story of the Eye

“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.”

Georges Bataille

Communication , Tear , Forgetting

“We can’t rely on anything. Except ourselves. Ludicrous responsibility devolves on us, overwhelms us. In every regard, right up the present, people always have relied on each other—or God.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. 3

God , People

“Man's secret horror of his foot is one of the explanations for the tendency to conceal its length and form as much as possible. Heels of greater or lesser height, depending on the sex, distract from the foot's low and flat character. Besides the uneasiness is often confused with a sexual uneasiness; this is especially striking among the Chinese who, after having atrophied the feet of women, situate them at the most excessive point of deviance. The husband himself must not see the nude feet of his wife, and it is incorrect and immoral in general to look at the feet of women. Catholic confessors, adapting themselves to this aberration, ask their Chinese penitents "if they have not looked at women's feet.
The same aberration is found among the Turks (Volga Turks, Turks of Central Asia), who consider it immortal to show their nude feet and whoe ven go to bed in stockings.
Nothing similar can be cited from classical antiquity (apart from the use of very high soles in tragedies). The most prudish Roman matrons constantly allowed their nude toes to be seen. On the other hand, modesty concerning feet developed excessively in the modern ea and only started to disappear in the nineteenth century. M. Salomon Reinarch has studied this development in detail in the article entitled Pieds pudiques [Modest Feet], insisting on the role of Spain, where women's feet have been the object of most dreaded anxiety and thus were the cause of crimes. The simple fact of allowing the shod foot to be seen, jutting up from under a skirt, was regarded as indecent. Under no circumstances was it possible to touch the foot of a woman.”

Georges Bataille

Source: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, p.21-22

Women , Secret , Sex , Study

“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

“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.”

Georges Bataille

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxvii

Nature , Learning , Time