Gary, I haven't been quiet for a week because I've lost interest. It's just that I've been buried under a mountain of marking and I've only just dug my way out. Amid the masses of mediocrity there was some real rubbish and one or two gems. Two of the honours essays were of particular interest to our conversation because they dealt with Bataille. One compared Bataille with Ficino, a neo-Platonic Christian mystic from the Renaissance. The other essay was on Bataille's poetics, if that's an adequate way of describing it (I don't think it is).

To deal with sovereignty Bataille needed to get away from utilitarian reason, which pretty much excluded philosophy from his endeavour. One can do a philosophical reconstruction if one wants but the outcome will be something other than Bataille. Bataille often wrote as if he was presenting a system but the system is a fake aimed at giving readers a sense of familiarity while he attempted to drag them into the abyss without their knowledge. He aims to demonstrate how to obtain the abyss, not enlightenment.

Poetry provided his path. Indeed, the universe is composed of poetry, a poetry that can only be reached through non-poetry and unreason. Sovereignty equals the self beyond itself. It is ecstasy, the fusion of the subject and the object. Poetry is the only method of attaining sovereignty, which requires the negation of poetry. Poetry must be negated through poetry, which presents an imitation of the abyss. Strictly speaking, evocation is not enough to attain sovereignty, which also requires experience, and moreover the co-operation of evocation and experience in their mutual dissolution.

Does this make any sense? I guess Bataille would say that it shouldn't. It can't be reducible to reason because reason leads away from sovereignty.

The writer analysed a couple of poems by Bataille, such as:

I leaning on the trunk
I feel
my desire to vomit desire
o collapse
ecstasy from which I fall
asleep
when I cry out
you who are and will be
when I will be no more
deaf X
giant mallet
crushing my head

(from Marie-Christine Lala, "The Hatred Of Poetry In Georges Bataille's Writing'. Bailey, C (ed) Bataille: Writing The Sacred. London: Routledge, 1995.)

According to the analysis in the essay, the first lines deal with the subject's yearning for the object, followed by an expression of their relation, which is also the relation between poetry and non-poetry. It is a poem of desire for the object, 'you who are and will be when I will be no more'

I don't know Lala's article and I can't find the poem in the Spitzer book of the Collected Poems Of Georges Bataille.