March 01, 2005

Blanchot on Bataille

In his essay on Bataille in The Infinite Conversation entitled 'Affirmation and the passion of negative thought' Blanchot mentions that Bataille's inner experience is a limit-experience.

Blanchot briefly describes what he means by a limit experience:

"The limit-experience is the response that man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question. This decision involving all being expresses the impossibility of ever stopping, whether it be at some consolation or some truth, at the interests or results of an action, or with the certitudes of knowledge and belief. It is a movement of contestation that traverses all of history, but that at times closes up into a system, at other times pieces the world to find its end in a beyond where man entrusts himself to an absolute term (God, Being, the Good, Eternity, Unity)--and in each case disavows itself." (p.204)

It is a form of negative thinking that does not merge with scepticism.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 1, 2005 06:17 AM | TrackBack
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