March 10, 2004

Bataille On Nietzsche#16

In chapter VII of the second part On Nietzsche Bataille turns away from the dialectic of desire inner experience and the risk of connecting with others in which desire leads to erotic and criminal situations.

He turns to Christian ecstasy.The connection?


"Christian mystics crucify Christ. The mystics love requires God to risk himself, to shriek out his despair on the cross. The basic crime associated with saints is erotic, related to the transports and tortured fevers that produce a burning love in the solitude of monastries and convents."

Bataille says that the extreme laceration at the foot of the cross can be compared to non-Christian mystical states.

"For both, sexual desire awakens ecstatic becomes the individual's annihilation. Sometimes the nothingness connected to mystical states is the nothingness of the subject..."

The nothingness is the night of anguish.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 10, 2004 08:43 PM | TrackBack
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