Trevor,
I'm off to Canberra tonight. So this is just a short note. My posting will probably be light over the next 4 days.

The recent entries on Bataille about the path to spirituality and the morality of decline reminds me of Nietzsche's ideas about a declining life.

Declining life for Nietzsche represents a reduction in vigor and capacity to enrich life. It contributes to a decrease in life.

Nietzsche contrasts this modality with an ascending life (Bataille's moral summit), which represents an incrment in vigor and capacity to enrich life.

An example of a declinig life is a life devoted to altruism which he sees as an example of slave morality based on self-denying value.

Bataille is working within the horizons of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals.