In Chapter 4 of part 11 of On Nietzsche Bataille is concerned with communication. He says:
"Individuals or humans can only "communicate"---live---outside of themselves. And being under the necessity of to "communicate" they're compelled to will evil and defilement, which, by risking the being within temselves, renders them mutually penetrable each to the other."
In commenting on this Bataille quotes from a previous work, Inner Experience, to the effect that human life is more than an incomprehensible inner stream; it is also an opening to whatever flows out or rushes up to it. Hence there is limit to inner experience and a movement --'transgression'---over that limit.
So we can have a situation in which there is an incompatibility of Bataille's inner experience with what society recognizes as valid experience. From what I can gather in Inner Experience Bataille says that this incompatibility or gap plunged him into a crisis of meaninglessness. Bataille asserts the primacy and inculpability of interior experience as a way to resolve this crisis. Inner "experience itself is the authority even if that authority expiates itself.
So Bataille starts from the intense flows of inner experience only to the boundaries of inner experience are fluid and porous. Bataille finds that he is exposed to others, to events.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 18, 2004 07:26 AM | TrackBack