Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2000 09:07:39 -0800
Subject: Aetheological Summa


Bataille and Mysticism: A "Dazzling Dissolution" 

Amy Hollywood 


Within Georges Bataille's texts of the late 1930s and 1940s, in particular
those later brought together in the tripartite Atheological Summa, he
repeatedly suggests that his primary models for writing and experience are
the texts of the Christian and non-Western mystical traditions (often
represented, in Bataille, by women's writings) and those of Friedrich
Nietzsche. 1 Inner Experience opens with evocations of Nietzsche, and the
final volume of the trilogy, On Nietzsche, is "devoted" to his work.
References to mystical writings occur throughout Inner Experience and
Guilty, and significant portions of both texts can be read as providing
"guides" for inner experience analogous to the "itineraries" of Angela of
Foligno (d. 1309) and Teresa of Avila (d. 1582) or as spiritual daybooks
like those of Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. ca. 1275). These models are, I
think, the key to understanding Bataille's own writing strategies in the
Atheological Summa. 2 Despite their apparent divergence, moreover, Bataille
insists that mystical and Nietzschean texts reflect and are constitutive of
the same experience and writing practice. 

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