Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataillewas a French intellectual and literary figure working in literature, philosophy, anthropology, economics, sociology and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including post-structuralism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth16 September 1897
CountryFrance
Georges Bataille quotes about
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.
[Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return] is what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every other system, don't forget, these moments are viewed as means: Every moral system proclaims that "each moment of life ought to be motivated." Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends.
Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.
How cruel my suffering is,—no one is more talkative than I am!
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.
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.
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.
Humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed in humanity-as-entirety.
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.
At man's core there is a voice that wants him never to give in to fear. But if it is true that in general man cannot give in to fear, at the very least he postpones indefinitely the moment when he will have to confront himself with the object of his fear... when he will no longer have the assistance of reason as guaranteed by God, or when he will no longer have the assistance of God such as reason guaranteed. It is necessary to recoil, but it is necessary to leap, and perhaps one only recoils in order to leap better.
I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.
To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.
Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.