Georges Bataille
Continental philosophy took shape across Europe in the early-to-mid twentieth century, drawing on currents of phenomenology, existentialism, and a persistent questioning of Enlightenment reason. Into that charged intellectual climate came Georges Bataille, a French writer and philosopher born on September 10, 1897, in Billom, who died in Paris on July 9, 1962.
Bataille was educated at the École des chartes, the institution devoted to archival and historical studies, and he worked as a librarian — a profession that kept him in close contact with texts while he pursued his own writing. He also worked as a draftsperson. His output in French placed him within the continental philosophy tradition while also associating him with the broader irrationalism movement, which pushed back against purely systematic or rationalist accounts of human experience.
His notable works span a wide range of registers. Story of the Eye and L'Abbé C belong to his more explicitly literary production, testing the outer edges of narrative form and content. Blue of Noon and The Impossible extend that same exploratory impulse. The Accursed Share develops an extended philosophical argument, while Literature and Evil brings a critical intelligence to bear on the nature of transgression in literary form. All of this work was carried out in the French language.
His association with both continental philosophy and irrationalism reflects the dual pull his writing exerted: seriously engaged with philosophical questions, yet resistant to the tidy conclusions that systematic thought tends to prefer. Bataille worked across fiction and non-fiction alike throughout his career as a writer and philosopher, and his connection to both the archival world of the librarian and the visual practice of the draftsperson made for an unusually varied body of work, one that ranged from novels like Blue of Noon to the economic and philosophical arguments of The Accursed Share.
Quotes by Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille's insights on:
The miraculous moment is the moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING. It is the moment when we are relieved of anticipation, man’s customary misery, of the anticipation that enslaves, that subordinates the present moment to some anticipated result. Precisely in the miracle, we are thrust from our anticipation of the future into the presence of the moment, of the moment illuminated by a miraculous light, the light of the sovereignty of life delivered from its servitude.
VII The happiness we find in becoming is possible only by annihilating the reality of “existences” and lovely appearance, and through the pessimistic destruction of illusions: so, by annihilating even the loveliest appearances, Dionysian happiness attains its height.
The certainty of incoherence in reading, the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books. Since appearance constitutes a limit, what truly exists is a dissolution into common opacity rather than a development of lucid thinking. The apparent unchangingness of books is deceptive: each book is also the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions.
A poet doesn’t justify-he doesn’t accept-nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.
Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.
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.
That discourse one might call the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.
