Trevor I'm quite happy to turn the conversation to Bataille.

But before we do I would like to say that we should not forget Nietzsche. We should let him slip into the background a bit and bring his texts forward when we need them.

Why the refusal to forget? The context you mention is an interview with Marguerite Duras. Duras is a writer of fiction who abandoned the standard (realist) novel form and established the nouveau roman or new novel, sometimes called the antinovel. This dispensed with previous notions of plot, character, style, theme, psychology, chronology, and message and by the latter part of the century it had created a tradition of its own. So the context is one of experimental literary form.

Nietzsche is historically important in terms of literary style as well as philosophical content. He creates a middle way between the austere academic style that few can read and the popular journalism style of mass culture that lacks content. He creates in the sense of a new way of writing. He takes issues that are of concern to us in every day life, develops an essay/aphorism/diary form, and writes in a way that is easily understood. Hence his popularity.

No one was writing like that in the nineteenth century in either the philosophy or the literary institutions. In more philosophical terms it represented a rupture from the traditional (Platonic) philosophical contempt for poetry and literature's resentment about the way it was treated by an arrogant philosophy that saw itself as the master discpline that looked over and criticized all of the other disciplines. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche's conception of philosophy as a way life reconnects philosophy to the personal confession of the author and to the emergence of a literary style as a kind of unconscious memoir.

That hybrid literary/philosophical form was picked up by the surrealists such as Bataille in France in the 1930s. Bataille more than anyone else understood this revolutionary Nietzsche. He picks up and plays with this Nietzschean style of writing through surealism.

Others have pickedup, and explored, Nietzsche's literary style. There is (perhaps) Heidegger's engagement with the German poets. Definitely the bricolage of Walter Benjamin of the Arcades Project, who uses the bits and pieces of older artifacts to produce a new, work that blurs the traditional distinctions between the old and the new and between high and low art. And the Adorno of Minima Moralia in Germany in the 1940s. Then the beat writers, including Charles Bukowski in the US in the 1950s and 1960s.

If you like, the new literary form is philosophy as/and literature. This literary-philosophical form then opens out into many anabranches that are still being explored.

Why is this form important for us? It offers a way to address the current crisis of the humanities in the corporate university. Philosophy is being marginalized, and apart from a few super heroes (Deleuze, Derrida etc) it has become lifeless and dried up as an academic discipline.

Consider the academic literary style: the scholarly academic book, the lecture, the academic paper, or the book review. These forms are designed for a specific pupose: establishing the creditionals necessary for academic career advancement and cultural authority. The work is not very creative or innovative. Most of the work produced is high-priced trash. You would only buy most of this if you were an academic and wanting to keep up to date with the commentary on the big names by other academics.

The corporate university is utterly indifferent to fostering new ways of writing. It will simply buy in a big name for prestige reasons. Utility rules. The new kinds of writing are outside, or exterior to the university, and as ways of writing, they remain foreign, excluded or repelled.

You sense the boundaries when you step from writing philosophy online from home into the inside of the university to teach. The boundaries may be porous---eg., philosophy jammm and this cafe philosophy may represent an intersection of the two series. Who knows what the jamming effects are? Will they produce new things? Will they insert a hesitation or pause with the habitual academic ways of working? Will the effects of this jammm allow some creative desires, which are currently buried in academia, to surface and become philosophy as a process of creative making?

The frozen boundaries still exist in Adelaide, and they continue to structure the possibilities of the becoming of new and transforming ways of writing that point to hypertext and the decentred electronic book. This discloses possibilities of unbounded tissue or networrk of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and non-texts.

"Nietzsche's" new literary form offers a way to do philosophy differently. The form can be connected to the new online technology of the weblog. The weblog offers up a way to explore the possibilities of a different and more fragmentary kind of writing It is designed to write longer and shorter fragments each day in the confessional mode. These fragments can then be montaged together into a loose assemblages.

Thats what I understood Bataille to be up too with his conception of philosophy as a way of life.

So let us not forget Nietzsche. He is too important to be left to the academic commentators.