Trevor, I've been busy on a job and so I've had little time to address the issues you raise here. I do want to sort out the differences between us over the French Nietzscheans, (Bataille, Klossowski, Derrida, Irigaray, Foucault, Deleuze) but not now.

In the meantime I will put my third concern about scholarship as a way of life on the table. I have no problem with that statement per se. I accept that scholarship is a certain kind of life. What I would want to add to that, is to redescribe the practice of scholarship as certain way of doing philosophy. Therefore, this kind of practice of philosophy as scholarship is a part of the tradition of philosophy as a way of life.

What I do have problems with your tacit assumption that scholarship as a way of life is not part of a whole tradition of philosophy as a way of life that is quite different to the current practice of academic philosophy. The principle scholarly exercise of this philosophy as a discourse is the explication of a text in the form of a constructing an argument as a stepping stone in the building of a system. In this academic tradition---both analytic and continental-- the teaching, training and research is about the discipline; it is a theoretical discourse not the art of living.

The tradition of philosophy as a way of life has been written out of the history of philosophy by academic historians of philosophy who describe philosophy in modern terms of building a system. You interpret Nietzsche this way:

"Yes, this is a long way from the death-orientated, romantic surrealist interpretation; just as it is also a long way from the final phase in Nietzsche's system identified by Salome. She doesn't call this final phase beyond will and representation; but I will. Bataille's position, and that of surrealism in general, is just as far from Schopenhauerian romanticism as the final position in Nietzsche's system Salome identifies." (my emphasis).

There is a tradition of the conception of philosophy as a way of life that has its roots in classical Greek and Roman philosophy. I have briefly referred to it before in relation to Nietzsche.

To take one known to both of us, Michel Foucault. I interpret the (late) Foucault (eg., texts such as The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self) as self-reflexively working within the tradition of philosophy as a way of life. This tradition is concerned with taking care of oneself, knowing oneself, forming people and transforming our subjectivity. It is a cultivation of the self to orient ourselves in the life of the city.

Foucault reflects on the Greco-Roman Epicurean and Stoic ethics, and redescribes these practices as the arts of existence and techniques of self, and gives them an aesthetic Nietzchean twist for the 20th century. Hence we have reventing or recreating ourselves through the transgression of norms, conventions and living experimentally. What Focuault fails to do is link this cultivation of self to being-in the-world and hence it is too subjectivist.

And the point of all this? That scholarship as a way of life is one way of articulating the diverse understandings of philosophy as way of life. There are many different kinds eg. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault. Your earlier post had a tendency to close out these other ways of understanding philosophy as a way of life.

This leads to difficulties as encountered by the students you mention doing Wayne's course. They interpreted Bataille in terms of the conventions of academic philosophy and end up in all sorts of difficulties. Your response, that Bataille is not a philosopher, is undercut by studying Bataille within a university course on philosophy and Bataille's own very self-conscious discussion of philosophical texts.