Well, Gary, I guess you’ll think what you like and nothing I can say will change that, so I’m not even going to try. But I will say this: there is no difference between the poetic Bataille of the Acephale and mystical ecstatic experience and the one of the College of Sociologie in the late 1930s. The College of Sociologie was the public front for the Acephale group. They existed at the same time. One did not follow the other or in any way reflect a change in perspective.

Habermas’s views on Bataille are about as adequate as his views on Adorno – in the same book, for that matter. As far as I’m concerned, what he says is a load of crap. And as for Derrida, well, his stuff just reflects the post-modern domestication of Bataille. These post-war post-moderns were a bunch of academics looking for a new line on which to build a career – perhaps I’m being harsh, unreasonable even, but I cannot help noticing how their ‘theorising’ has provided a convenient justification for the current fascist-corporatist attack on discipline and more generally standards in the universities. These places were never too great but they were never as low as they are now. And this isn’t just a piece of misprision, a convenient misreading of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard and Lyotard. It’s not necessary to misread them. All the present barbarians have to do is read them as they are.

The left Hegelian Bataille wasn’t elided in the honours course in European Studies at Adelaide University because of his associations with Marxism. I provided the material for the seminars on Bataille and I’ve got no problems with Marxism – at least, I don’t think I have. As far as I’m concerned, corporatism is the highest form of imperialism and imperialism is the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie. Okay, so this last part is form Hannah Arendt but it’s more Marxist than most people have a stomach for.

Having said all this, I’ve got no problem with you trying to extract a ethic from this if that is your want. From my perspective, that’s what you are doing with Nietzsche, perhaps with more justification. There seem to be as many Nietzsches as there are interpreters so I’m not going to press the point.

The Bataille that wrote Guilty postdates the College Bataille and this is what he had to say about philosophy:

‘philosophy takes on a strange dignity from the fact that it supposes infinite questioning. It's not that results gain philosophy some glamour, but only that it responds to the human desire that asks for a questioning of all that is. No one doubts that philosophy is often pointless, an unpleasant way of employing minor talents. But whatever the legitimate biases on this subject, however erroneous (contemptible, even heinous) the "results," its abolition runs into this difficulty - that exactly this lack of real results is its greatness. Its whole value is in the absence of rest that it fosters.’

Perhaps this is in keeping with your Bataille. It’s also in keeping with mine.

Your stuff on pornography is good. You ask, ‘What would these transgressions be today. Porn? Or the S & M practices of today?’ I think it’s just an escape valve. I suspect there aren’t too many sovereigns among its devotees. Maybe I’m wrong but I doubt it. Hey, the Adelaide Advertiser regularly uses female bodies to help sell its Saturday magazine section. I don’t think they’re interested in promoting sovereignty.

Try sex and drugs and rock’n’roll.
No need to try to save your soul.

In the end, perhaps we’re not as far apart as you think.