This isn't the reply to your other two points as I promised, Gary. You'll remember that I bent the conversation towards Bataille with the intention of taking it in a literary direction. Since then it has seemed to swing back towards philosophy, which is okay, but I'd like to say a few things about literature and how Bataille fits into the picture for me.
Basically, I see the whole modernist project---i.e., twentieth century literature--- to break or go beyond both the novel form and the nineteenth century realist tradition in general. This advance occurred along two main paths: twentieth century realism (cubism) and surrealism (don't ask me to define these developments because I'm making this up as I go along). There are any number of antecedents, of course, but as far as I see it this literary project begins with Proust and concludes with Bukowski---not that Bukowski wrapped things up or anything like that, but rather that's where it had reached by the end of the century. In my view, Bukowski is our immediate antecedent as we look into the black abyss of the twenty-first century.
They keep giving Nobel Prizes to novelists but why should we respect a prize handed out by arms manufacturers in any case? It's all a part of them seeing to it that the world works in the way they want, and that's got nothing to do with literature. With one or two exceptions they seem to have missed the point in distributing the prizes, which are generally indistinguishable from Booker Prizes, i.e., something created to help sell books.
Why didn't Bataille win a Nobel Prize? Why didn't Karen Blixen? Or Carson McCullers? Or Céline? My God, how could he be left out? And why not Bukowski? Since Patrick White, with the exception of Canetti, who else among the winners has written anything even half as significant as Bukowski? Nobody.
Bukowski transformed the novel, the novella, the poem and journalism into something that, while not formless, is different from any of the previous forms. His poems abandon metaphor. Other than in terms of line structure, they are indistinguishable from aphorisms, observations, and pieces of short fiction. The larger texts are episodic and are composed of short pieces. Somehow, in the end, some of these aggregations look like books of poems while others seem like novels, if I can use the term loosely.
Bukowski's antecedents: Proust is there in the fictionalised autobiography, as is Céline. Indeed, in the case of all three writers, their oeuvres can be seen as one big work rather than a collection of independent texts. This says something about the twentieth century needs and the reality that required expression.
At this point fiction goes closest to Bataille's uncategorisable trilogy, Summa Atheologica, consisting of the texts Inner Experience, Guilty and On Nietzsche. As with Madame Edwarda, Bataille is attempting to abandon style in these books. After all, what is style but literary trickery, seduction?
In the end his books suffer the fate of most surrealist works---they don't reach a wide audience. Céline is undoubtedly the main figure of the century in dealing with this impasse. His books grab hold of you and don't let you go. As Benjamin noted, he adopted the language of the lumpenproletariat, which is essentially a non-metaphorical poetic language. Céline made a trademark of one of the most powerful but also under-utilised literary devices: onomatopoeia. With onomatopoeia words go beyond the language of reason and become absolutely evocative. They are more like what Walter Benjamin calls 'language as such' rather than the 'languages of man'
Enough of this---you are probably starting to get my picture. I'm interested in Bataille in terms of this kind of literary development. Don't get me wrong: the philosophical stuff is also interesting, but Bataille has something else to offer that goes beyond philosophy. Indeed that is the whole point of the exercise I'm trying to describe.
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