March 18, 2004
I'm stilll struggling with Bataille's On Nietzsche. It is a very elusive text. I've just decided that I've been coming at this text all wrong.
I don't mean that I want to jettison the Hegelian phenomeological structure of reaching out to another through the breaching of individual self-suficiency. Rather the text is more basic that the core of Hegel's dialectic of master servant ---ie; the desire to reach out to another from one's inner experience.
Sure, that is how Bataille talks. But underneath this talk is something more basic/primitive/existential: it is Hegel's conception of life depending on death. If you like Bataille is looking at death in the face and tarrying with it. Bataille's text is a confrontation with, and an overcoming of, death.
I had got it with my experience of the flying on the plane to Canberra. Flying is all about death. It is a tarrying with the negative of life. But I forgot the death part of that experience and only remembered the reaching out to others.
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