In 1920, Georges Bataille was in his second year at École Nationale des Chartes when he signed up for a research trip to London. During that trip, he made the acquaintance of Henri Bergson, who was then on the pinnacle of his fame and an acknowledged influence on the younger French philosophers, including Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Bataille, still relatively new to the European cultural scene, did not read any books by Bergson and in fact, by his own admission, was supremely uninterested in philosophy as a discipline. Hoping to familiarise himself with Bergson’s work prior to the meeting, Bataille procured a copy of Laughter (1900), the philosopher’s shortest book. Reading it he found the book disappointing, and his overall impression with the author was a let-down as well.1placeholder Nevertheless the question of laughter, which Bataille thought Bergson had fallen short of theorising, had provided the former a revelatory key, the first stone of foundation onto which he would be constructing his own philosophical system for years to come. In “Nonknowledge, Laughter and Tears”, a lecture from 1953, Bataille defines laughter as the “central given, the primary given, and perhaps even the given behind philosophy;” he goes so far as to declare his philosophy a “philosophy of laughter,” one that is “founded on the experience of laughter and […] does not even claim to go further.”2placeholder
There were several other occasions in Bataille’s life wherein the experience of laughter made an indelible impact and shaped the evolution of his ideas. But before going into each of those instances and examining their significance to the subject at hand, a few notes should be made on Bergson and his illuminating thesis.
Laughter, subtitled “An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” was published in 1900 and comprises three essays that originally appeared in Revue de Paris, a French literary magazine. The word “comic” accurately describes the laughter Bergson is targeting in the book: the laughter that is the opposite of sadness and tragedy, being activated in the way something falls “on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled”3placeholder – the laughter, in sum, that is invariably accompanied by an absence of feeling. A laughter that is shot through with emotions other than pure comedy would be the kind we experience when witnessing a person slipping on a banana peel: one that is mingled with pity and horror.4placeholder True laughter requires a dispassionate agent whose capacity for humour is unaffected by the moral overtone of a comic situation. Fundamentally, laughter assumes the importance of a social gesture, a corrective of the absurdity and waywardness of everyday lives. As Bergson observes, the source of our laughter is most often directed at objects that betray a pronounced and peculiar inadaptability to the society at large or the mechanism of life. When we laugh at the victim of the banana peel, we object to the grotesque display of the victim’s sudden rigidity of body, which is preceded by a momentary lapse of attention and followed by the actual fall, and moreover to its incongruence with normal behaviours.
Laughter presents a detailed and thoroughgoing exploration of the various aspects of comedy, all of which can be approximated in the suggestion of physical rigidity.5placeholder Written at the dawn of the Machine Age, Bergson’s thesis was partly a reflection on the collective dread and anxiety that greeted the increasing modernisation of urban life and its way of thinking. Laughing at anything that resembles a machine provides relief and distance from what is naturally alien to us. It also gives one a feeling of superiority, an incontestable right to belittle, as Bergson believes that in laughter there is always “an unavowed intention to humiliate and to reprove.”6placeholder
Whilst Bergson’s book focussed on the nature and the causality of laughter, Bataille was more interested in what this most human and demonstrative reaction revealed about our relationship with the prevailing reality. Bataille’s obsession with laughter was possibly engendered at a young age. Bataille’s father, plagued by syphilis, had been blind and paralysed long before the birth of his second son. The horrific sight of his father’s degradation – the madman would alternate between “screams of pain and soundless peals of laughter” – and the chore of tending to his basic needs sparked the conception of Bataille’s first short story, W. C. (1926), which he subsequently burnt.7placeholder Yet, the disgust and fascination of seeing his father in such wretched state were something Bataille could never forget, and later he would again invoke the experience in his first completed work, Histoire de l’oeil (1928).
In 1923 Bataille went on a trip to Siena. He visited the Cathedral and, standing before its portals, Bataille was suddenly overcome by an uncontrollable urge to laugh.8placeholder It is worth noting that prior to this trip Bataille, despite incessant questioning of his beliefs, had been able to maintain a tenuous connection to Catholicism. The incident at the Cathedral portended an imminent end to his belief in God – God was more or less dead the moment he emitted that laughter.9placeholder
The moment Bataille abjured his faith he started sampling the erotic underworld of the city of Paris. His first encounter was momentous, to say the least:
“[…] it was really necessary for me to be at the height of this circumstance I secretly imagine, in a flash of heat, and so as to laugh (only laughter would rise to the level of this terror), that I’m not a young, trembling, inexperienced student but an old bullfighting horse which lost her filthy entrails four days ago on the sand of the ring.”10placeholder
The void left by a religion that Bataille no longer believed in was soon filled by his obscene delight in brothels and the debauchery they promised. In his mind the house of lust and ill-repute would come to be endowed curiously with a halo of beatitude, with a sacredness that was predicated on decay and abasement, that the Gospel sought unavailingly to attain with its divine words. Bataille would later confess: “My true church is a whorehouse- the only one that gives me true satisfaction.”11placeholder
It was also a mingled sense of the sacred and the profane that Bataille discerned in laughter’s intrinsic character. He conceived of laughter as belonging to the domain of the unknown. It is a closed domain that is in direct contrast to the domain of the known, which is made stable with its access to knowledge, to clear consciousness, to God, to lucidity of vision, to self-affirmation circumscribed by the fact of mortality. The unknown bespeaks the unstable, the unforeseeable, and, essentially, the unknowable. Laughter, says Bataille, constitutes “part of an ensemble of possible reactions when facing the unknown.”12placeholder When one laughs this “intimate overturning and suffocating surprise” culminates in the suppression of the known, and in the possible attainment of the unknown.13placeholder
Death impregnates the vast unknown, which is epitomised by its absence of presuppositions and by its blithe disregard to what awaits in the future. When we laugh, we are carried no further than to the brink of nonknowledge, to not death itself but a foretaste of death. Laughter draws a line between life and death, between the known and the unknown, between the finite and the infinite, between, as referred to elsewhere in Bataille’s work, “the discontinuous and the continuous.”14placeholder “Laughter teaches us that when we flee wisely from the element of death, we merely want to preserve life,” Bataille writes in Literature and Evil (1957).15placeholder By laughing at death, one assumes the flippancy of making a game of death, insofar as death seems to appear momentarily light and less hostile. But that does not mean that the horror of death is therefore conquered, or its gravity by any means diminished. In the preface to the third edition of his novella Madame Edwarda (1957), Bataille notes that laughter is a “compromise attitude man adopts when confronted by something whose appearance repels him, but which at the same time does not strike him as particularly grave.”16placeholder He obviously had in mind his epiphanous encounter with Parisian nightlife.
The inexplicable urge to laugh at what one fears, to basically laugh at whatever is foreign, that is removed from one’s experience or knowledge of things, implies a form of derision, of unsolicited obloquy. Further on in Madame Edwarda, Bataille writes
“Laughter launches us along the path that leads to the transforming of a prohibition’s principle, of necessary and mandatory decencies, into an iron-clad hypocrisy, into a lack of understanding or an unwillingness to understand what is involved.”17placeholder
On this Bataille seems in some way to be echoing Bergson’s central argument in Laughter. Whilst Bergson is stressing the advantage of laughing as a social corrective, Bataille is underscoring an element of superiority that is implicit in such laughter. By laughing at the object of one’s aversion or fear one is seemingly elevated to a dominant post where one triumphs over the crippling emotions that whereas, in tears, for example, one can never do.
We laugh at the sight of a person slipping on a banana peel on the sidewalk because it is, at the moment, very funny. But when the person suffers some kind of injury from the slip, or when we realise that the person is someone that we know, the laughter naturally becomes strained. A sustained laughter in this case might still trigger our anguished knowledge of what the accident may lead to, of the possibility of us landing in the same mishap, and this in turn provokes the awareness of our incompetence, of occurrences that are out of our hands but inevitable, like death; coming to the end of this reasoning, our laughter might cease, and our mirth succeeded by pity. In this we are like the spectators of a sacrifice, who steal through the killing of a victim a tantalising glimpse of the unknown, a promise of the lost intimacy. In sum, laughter, says Bataille, “assumes the absence of a true anguish, and yet it has no other source than anguish.”18placeholder
The misery of Bataille’s laughter is further exacerbated by one’s innate desire of and strenuous effort in becoming a person that is complete and exemplary. The victim of the banana peel, if he is a serious man by nature, will doubtlessly be embarrassed and upset if his ineptitude is greeted by a round of hilarity. This disgraced person’s pretension at seriousness is suddenly thwarted by the bystanders’ laughter, which is, as Bataille puts it, “born of changes in level, sudden depressions.”19placeholder In Bataille, it is the person who laughs along with everyone else, and thus released from pretension, from the vain hope for self-completion, that truly possesses the secret of the unknown, of a beyond of homogeneous existence.
Bataille compares mankind to a bull who oscillates between making a plaything of death and becoming the plaything of death.20placeholder He who laughs at death is of an animal indifference that embraces the void, the abyss, that finally kills the laughter. Such a bravado is only for an instant, but at the height of laughter one attains to the state of true sovereignty. The sovereign, in Bataille’s definition, is a “NOTHING” that exceeds human capacity, that resists any attempt to affirm or to register its abstract nature, being transcendent of materiality. An experience of the sovereign would be comparable to a religious experience, the ecstasy of which evokes the “aphrodisiac properties” of flowers or amour between lovers.21placeholder The sovereign proper – a sovereignty that is unrefracted by objectivity – would be the unknown itself.
Laughter is, properly speaking, allowed only snippets of the unknown, which dissolve the moment they are being apprehended. The unknown, as Bataille understands it, promises “the possibility of an experience as rich as the religious experience offered at the height of the knowledge that is revelation.”22placeholder The laughter that Bataille was seized with upon entering the Siena Cathedral was a revelation that, as a fledgling philosopher, he struggled to encapsulate in clear description. Bataille discovered then that the philosopher could not gain full access to the truth and the essence of laughter unless he ceased to be a philosopher. The theory of laughter, says Bataille, “does not give us the specificity of laughter.”23placeholder It is through direct experience, in praxis, that the “specificity” is furnished – in Bataille’s first full-length philosophical treatise, Inner Experience (1943), he writes: “I live by tangible experience and not by logical explanation.”24placeholder
This personal credo would later evolve into to a single, all-consuming task of circumventing the discrepancy between reality and representation. Laughter’s resistance to the substantiation of language is indicative in its volatile nature. At its worst laughter assumes an irruptive force that upends the established order and disrupts the natural course of things. It invariably feeds on violence, and with this follows the ensuing chaos and instability. Bataille conceived of lived experience as fundamentally ruptured by one’s inner turmoil, a “swelling tumult continuously on the verge of explosion.”25placeholder Laughter is located at the heart of this turmoil, this rupture that tears through the disguise and reveals the raw core of human psyche. Along with tears, ecstasy, sexual intercourse, violence, intoxication, sacrifice, poetry, etc., laughter is an effusion whose use value is for the most part external to the general productive system. In The Accursed Share (1949), Bataille presents a new economic theory that is centralised in the question of excess. The book starts with the observation of a natural phenomenon: “The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life.”26placeholder The surplus energy can easily grow into “an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion.”27placeholder To head off the explosion, the excess should be expended in ways more ethical, and less violent and catastrophic, in their consequence. Laughter is one of the advisable means, for sure, but regardless of the result it arrives at – a result that might bring about something productive to future events – the act itself remains an unproductive expenditure, ready to be disposed of. The end of a laughter is always and entirely of the present: to gratify the desire and to exhaust the need without concern of what tomorrow may bring.
In his review of Inner Experience, Sartre remarks that Bataille’s laughter is “bitter and strained […] He tells us that he laughs, he doesn’t make us laugh.”28placeholder Nietzsche’s laughter, which Bataille resonates by virtue of its tendency to the sovereign, is regarded by Sartre as relatively lighthearted.29placeholder Bataille responds to Sartre’s article with a backhanded compliment:
“Sartre, basing himself on my book, aptly describes the workings of my mind, underscoring the foolishness of its workings better from the outside than I could from the inside (I was moved). He accurately analyses my mental state and, as I should point out, objectively and clearly dissects this state so as to bring out (appropriate) comic effects.”30placeholder
But it is true that, in Inner Experience, Bataille sketches a concept that radically departs from the Nietzschean fröhliche (“joy”). Self-knowledge is at the source of his laughter – a knowledge of self as irremediably abject and powerless. “Man ceases – at the limit of laughter – to wish himself,” Bataille says “to be everything and wishing himself in the end to be what he is, imperfect, incomplete, good…”31placeholder “Good” not in the moral sense but as the opposite of “Evil”, which Bataille, in his later work, designates as the index of the heterogeneous. Evil precipitates a “breaking down of established patterns […] of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals.”32placeholder Good is accordingly what holds the society together, the linchpin of the general thraldom of mankind to thinghood.33placeholder A well-ordered society would naturally rely on the reigning of Good, but the recognition of Good entails the inextirpable presence of Evil. From the Good/Evil duality may be derived other similar ones: the duality of taboo and transgression, for example, which constitutes a major theme of Bataille’s. The “taboo is there to be violated,” Bataille states in Eroticism (1957).34placeholder Conversely, transgression “suspends a taboo without suppressing it,”35placeholder for a total removal of taboos or other forms of prohibition would mean a return to animal violence, whereas a “successful transgression,” in Bataille’s words, maintains the prohibition “in order to benefit by it.”36placeholder The alternation of taboo and transgression describes a manifest aspect of what is known as the “unity of opposites”: the push and pull a result of the opposition divorced from finalism.
The contrast between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous follows a different rule. In theory, the two realms coexist. It is a coexistence that does not exactly imply a reconciliation, provisional or permanent, of contrasting parts: the heterogeneous, being external to the very condition wherein its abstract form is envisaged, constitutes its own totality. Indeed, there is not so much an antithesis as a disparateness between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous – the latter commanding an entirely different order of elements whose elusive nature can only be grasped in reductive, largely specious, terms – but it is also true that both are correlatively defined. The notion of the heterogeneous remains a theoretical conception that diverges from its a-theoretical core: in the interest of gaining a more tenable standpoint, Bataille suggests the epithet “non-homogeneous”, which “supposes a knowledge of the homogeneity that delineates it by exclusion.”37placeholder It is finally a homogeneity all the same, but, in this limited context notwithstanding, can we determine some relative values of which the abstraction, cursed with a futile striving beyond the edge of reason, is in some way justified?
Being a condition that challenges stasis and stability, laughter may create such opportunities for approximating the heterogeneous proper by way of a spasm, a mild explosiveness, that breaks up the state of things. Laughter, according to Bataille, derives from the “extremely vague and distant character of the intellectual domain”; as a reaction, it is able to “go from a speculation resting on abstract facts to a practice whose mechanism is not different, but which immediately reaches concrete heterogeneity…”38placeholder Homogeneity will soon restore the general order when the laughter ceases, but a glimmer of this beyond is enough as proof that human life is not always bound up with the primacy of work and survival – a fascination with the dangerous and the illicit is innate in every one of us. Civilisation, as Freud famously claimed, is “built up on the suppression of our drives”39placeholder; for Bataille, the need to curb natural urges is itself an urge, the ferocity of which only heightens the allure of its reverse. Self-loss is thus implicit as either a foreseeable consequence or a parallel feeling in sex and violence, but in the case where a link is subsequently established between extreme experience and death, the grounds for it are, more often than not, purely theoretical.
In other words, it is usually not the real death that we encounter in the heat of the moment, but a sensation of what to us is and will ever remain an unknown event. To be in some sort of a rupture in which our finitude is thrown into relief – a rupture that “opens the abyss,” according to Bataille – certainly moves us closer to the elusive source than when, as in witnessing a ritual killing, for example, the process of rupturing unfolds before our eyes from a safe distance.40placeholder Laughter is itself a rupture – Bataille breaks down its inner workings: laughter “most often decomposes without consequence, and sometimes with a virulence that is so pernicious that it even puts in question composition itself, and the wholes across which it functions.”41placeholder The “decomposition” is in part a “dramatisation,” Bataille says elsewhere, that actuates the laughing impulse to “stream forth into a renewed fusion, breaking us again at the mercy of errors committed in wanting to break ourselves…”42placeholder All of the so-called heterogeneous-inclined phenomena involve dramatisation: the sacrificial rite, for example, is a spectacle of an intense drama of killing that evidences a symbolic and temporary fuse of the profane and the sacred. To dramatise is to internalise the violence of a breaking-up, thereby turning it into a common experience. Therein lies the main drawback of dramatisation as a tactic of or an access to the heterogeneous proper: it cannot develop “without means which are commensurate to naïve aspirations,” says Bataille, “like that of never dying.”43placeholder To laugh then, as we can infer, is partly to tempt death, but in a condition dictated by our present aliveness, the only reality that yields any meaning to us.
It is the other reality that laughter opens up: a reality that is presently inaccessible but plausible, is indeed inevitable as an outcome of individual fate; a reality whose essence defies articulation and cannot be traceable to any discernible source; a pure abstraction, in short, that is extraneous to all living matters but seems in some way to be continuous with them. If we equate such reality with death, we betray our failure to fully disengage ourselves from the authority which dictates our view: the authority of solid homogeneity. To not speak about death, to thus not relegate the notion to an object of knowledge, and to conform to a language of ambivalence that most aptly answers the non-justifiable nature of the subjects, Bataille preferred the word NOTHING, which describes a “subjective experience of an objectlessness” that can be located “at the very point where knowledge and unknowing are both actual, knowledge being implied in the objectivity of experience, unknowing being given subjectively.”44placeholder Much of Bataille’s philosophy revolves around the dilemma of finding a language that bypasses the imperative of “making sense.” “Mr. Bataille refuses to see that nonknowing remains immanently in thinking,” Sartre points out in his review. “Thinking that thinks that it is not knowing remains thinking.”45placeholder Bataille’s response doubles down on the aporia: “Naturally in one form or another, I’ve myself observed these inextricable difficulties to which Sartre refers: my thinking and its workings took these very difficulties as their starting point, though this was like a landscape glimpsed from a speeding train – what could be seen was always simply their dissolution into movement.”46placeholder
“Movement” is a key word – and a central motif – of Bataille’s heterology. True heterogeneity reveals itself in motion. A notable case in point is eroticism. Bataille likens sexual acts to religious festivals and breaks down their seemingly intricate mechanism in his book Eroticism: “The sexual relationship is itself a communication and a movement, it is like a celebration by nature, and because it is essentially a communication it provokes an outward movement in the first place.”47placeholder This “outward movement” will generate a violence that, once fulfilled, invariably calls for a “retraction and a renunciation” which, Bataille continues, “also require a rule to organise the merry-go-round and ensure the return of the forward movement.”48placeholder The whole rigmarole would, in theory, soon be brought to a stop if sexual desire were sated – in which condition the heterogeneous proper would identify itself with a totality that, on account of its pure abstractness, evades justification. In other words, the “retraction and renunciation,” which indicate the anxiety and fear in the face of eroticism, anticipate, so to speak, the negation of the homogeneous. That homogeneity is at the origin of the heterogeneous points to the latter’s theoretical foundation, which suggests in turn that the notion is essentially meaningless on its own.
A failure to lose oneself, as we may then infer, is a condition of achieved self-loss: a major preoccupation of Bataille’s writing was to make a show of this very failure by dint of a paradoxical sublation of written words – to the extent that sentences became elaborate and convoluted, and the arguments took on a labyrinthine complexity. Similarly, when one laughs at the mention of death one does not thereby exorcise death, but the very impudence of laughing at death – and its apparent void of sense and purpose – signifies a critical step towards, if not the impossible merging of the two separate worlds, then at least establishing a theoretical difference between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. This is true of all phenomena of the heterogeneous-inclined on which Bataille centres his arguments, whose guiding principle is a “reason” that ceases, says Bataille, “to be divine, remains an awakening not to reason, nor to the absence of reason, but to this most complete reason, the reason which is its own night for itself, the reason which, as reason, judges itself not to be unreasonable, but which is just as obscure as the absence of reason.”49placeholder In other words, it is a reason that masquerades itself as unreason, whilst still bound up with the command and the system of the reasonable. Such paradox goes hand in hand with another: that the only practice compatible to the thought of unreason must be grounded in its inevitable collapse into self-parody (in the sense that the unreason is, for all intents and purposes, simulated for the benefit of the non-dialectical thinking). A short comment in Inner Experience suffices to cap off Bataille’s idiosyncratic philosophy: “Thought ruins.”
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volumes II & III, trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
Bataille, Georges. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986).
Bataille, Georges. Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2011).
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, trans. trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014).
Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London, Penguin Books, 2012).
Bataille, Georges. My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London, Penguin Classics, 2012).
Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (London, Continuum, 2008).
Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, Zone Books, 2012).
Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Lesley Jr. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Fred Rothwell (New York, Dover Publications, 2005).
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2002).
Kendall, Stuart. Georges Bataille (London, Reaktion Books, 2007).
Lacey, A. R. Bergson: The Argument of Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1989).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Un Nouveau Mystique,” Cahiers du Sud, February 1943.
Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002).
For a full personal account of Bataille’s encounter with Bergson, see Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), pp. 69-70.
Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 138.
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Fred Rothwell (New York, Dover Publications, 2005), p. 2.
A mediated laughter does not seem to be qualified as a real laughter in Bergson’s dictionary. In this the philosopher is envisioning a laughter that is pure, unadulterated and sovereign (not to be confused with Bataille’s “sovereign laughter”), one that is an end in itself. Scholars like A.R. Lacey found this understanding of laughter tenable so long as it is not applied to every real-life comic situation. For more of Lacey’s analysis of Bergson’s text, see Lacey, A. R. Bergson: The Argument of Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 188-93.
Assuming that the comic is only of marginal interest to Bataille, I took the liberty of skipping Bergson’s explication of comedy, which, however, it should be noted, is inextricably bound up with his thoughts on laughter in the book.
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Fred Rothwell (New York, Dover Publications, 2005), p. 67.
Kendall, Stuart. Georges Bataille (London, Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 13.
See Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), p. 51.
Bataille made clear that after his meeting with Bergson he still thought of himself as a Catholic. He did not pinpoint the exact moment, or the exact circumstance, that the conflict between religion and his personal conviction started rear its head. Surya assumed that it was during the Siena trip that the loss of faith appeared to have become definitive. See Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 140; and Surya, p. 17.
Quoted in Surya, p. 84.
Bataille, Georges. Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2011), p. 12.
Bataille. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, p. 136.
Bataille. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, p. 136.
To bracket discontinuity and continuity with the other paradigms seems to invite confusion and misunderstanding. The duality of discontinuity and continuity is actually closely connected with Bataille’s conception of animality and immanence. Continuity marks the death of the being and a return to the lost immanence. See the chapter on animality in Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, Zone Books, 2012), pp. 17-25.
Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London, Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 55-56.
Bataille, Georges. My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London, Penguin Classics, 2012), p. 124.
Bataille, Georges. My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London, Penguin Classics, 2012), p. 124.
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, trans. trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 98. Earlier in the book Bataille says: “[…] to be a child, one must know that seriousness exists- elsewhere and insignificant- if not the child could no longer laugh or know anguish.” (Ibid., p. 50). See also Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s essay “The Laughter of Being” in Modern Language Notes, vol. 102, no. 4., pp. 140-41, and Bataille’s meditation on anguish and laughter in his notes to Inner Experience, p 233.
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, trans. trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 92.
Bataille. Inner Experience, p. 94.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Lesley Jr. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 12.
Bataille. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, p. 141.
Bataille. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, p. 135.
Bataille. Inner Experience, p. 39.
Bataille, Georges. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986), p. 59.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 21.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 24.
Quoted in Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Un Nouveau Mystique,” Cahiers du Sud, February 1943.
Bataille cites the following quote from The Will to Power in On Nietzsche (1945): “To see tragic natures founder and be able to laugh despite feelings of profound understanding, emotion, and sympathy, which are also felt: this is divine.” Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (London, Continuum, 2008), pp. 165-66.
Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (London, Continuum, 2008),p. 170.
Bataille. Inner Experience, p. 26.
Bataille. Eroticism, p. 11.
Bataille. Eroticism, “By work man orders the world of things and brings himself down to the level of a thing among things; work makes a worker a means to an end.”, p. 157.
Bataille. Eroticism, p. 64.
Bataille. Eroticism, p. 36.
Bataille. Eroticism, p. 38.
Bataille. Visions of Excess, p. 140.
Bataille. Visions of Excess, p. 99.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 130.
Bataille. Inner Experience, p. 91.
Bataille. Visions of Excess, p. 176.
Bataille. Inner Experience, p. 11.
Bataille. Inner Experience, p. 11.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volumes II & III, trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: Zone Books, 2017), p. 202, 204.
Quoted in Bataille. On Nietzsche, p. 171.
Bataille. On Nietzsche, p. 172.
Bataille. Eroticism, p. 207.
Bataille. Eroticism, p. 207.
Quoted in Surya, p. 430.