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December 7, 2003
I'm continuing to read Bataille's On Nietzsche. I've just started Chapter 1.
Bataille appears to be living alone in isolation with Nietzsche's text, The Will To Power. In the opening chapter Bataille says that this text is his company on earth.
Bataille quotes a paragraph in The Will to Power where Nietzsche says:
"If from the death of God, we don't fashion a major renunciation and perpetual victory over ourselves, we'll have to pay for that loss."
I cannot find the quote in Nietzsche's text. No matter. It is just pulled out and used as a part of Bataille's narrative.
Bataille interprets this sentence to mean that we cannot rely on anything but ourselves. He finds that responsibility overwhelming. He understands that he stands in a new era. Previously people always relied on each other, or God. No longer.
Now we stand alone in the chaos, nothingness and nihilism. Stripped of the old moral clothing that once protected us. We are homeless.
By 'the death of God' Nietzsche means that Europeans are losing the centre of moral gravity by virtue of which we have lived for 2 thousand years. The old Christian moral antidote against nihilism no longer works for us. We are lost---the universe seems to have lost value and has become meaningless---and we plunge into opposite valuations.
We stand alone. Stripped. Confronting the chaos and wildness of nature and sensing the blood rage surging within us. Bataille says:
"And don't I too carry within me a blood rage, a blindness satisfied by the hunger to met out blows? How would I enjoy being a pure snarl of hatred, demanding death: the upshot being no prettier than two dogs going at it tooth and nail!"
This passage illustrates Bataille's idea of the intensity of experience that you mentioned in this earlier post.Intensity is a redescription of Nietzsche's Dionysian impulse or mode of existence in The Birth of the Tragedy, which he identified suffering as the emotional basis for community and tragedy.
Bataille then quotes Nietzsche to the effect of everyone walking naked, the good and the bad, side by side. For those who live knowledge this is a celebration. These thinkers look inside themselves, as this leads directly to chaos and a labyrinth existence.
So Bataille's pathway from nihilism makes a turn inward to inner experience. It is what we would call the "psychoanalytic" pathway.
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