Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2000 09:05:38 -0800
Subject: Re: dumezil



Satre reproaches Bataille for his "two hundred pages of trumped-up
considerations on human misery" in his "Inner Life"

Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism 

Jean-Michel Heimonet 

at 

http://www.phreebyrd.com/~sisyphus/bataille/gbheimonet.html

"...the religious element in which Inner Experience is immersed is even more
closely allied to Nietzsche's style in Ecce Homo or The Will to Power; there
is the same "breathless disarray," the same "passionate symbolism," the same
"prophetic preaching tone" [176]. One might as well say that what the
representatives of this tradition share is a pathic use of thought and
speech, the power of an unbridled affectivity, which leads them to scorn
"the serene craft of writing" [177]. In his relation to this tradition,
already suspect for its irrationalism and vitalism, Bataille embodies
excess. He takes the tradition to its most fierce and in the same move gets
out of it. In Pascal, and even still in Nietzsche, passion is restrained in
argumentation and organized thought; in Bataille, on the other hand, passion
literally blows apart the frame of discourse: "feeling is everywhere," "at
the beginning and at the end" [177]. But what Sartre finds really outrageous
is that this feeling is still speaking: it is not at all meant to resolve
itself in shouts or in silence. If one is to believe Sartre, Bataille
"hates" language; he hates it as a kind of screen interposed between thought
and life, posing an obstacle to living, immediate and sufficient expression
("Mr. Bataille would like to exist here and now, whole and immediate"
[178]). To satisfy this "hatred," the strange goal of Inner Experience will
become the sacrifice of words, but--so as to make the torture perfect--to
sacrifice words by using words themselves, by burning them, dispensing them
heedlessly, so that language is compelled to say that which goes beyond
language [see 179]. 1 This interpretation, which posits a language
holocaust, paradoxically intended to regenerate language by confronting it
with its other, with the ineffable of passion and will..."



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