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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

returning to Bataille#20 « Previous | |Next »
November 27, 2004

Joe,
I found your remark on Bataille's reading of Nietzsche very suggestive.

I had not read the earlier Inner Experience, did not know about the triology of La Somme Aaeologiquie and just jumped into reading On Nietzsche blind. Why? Trevor had mentioned Bataille, I saw On Nietzsche in a bookshop and bought it. I started reading whilst trucking back and forth to Canberra, thinking it was going to about Nietzsche and the revaluation of our values.

Was I in for a suprise. I got the rebellion against and the opposition to, the morality and utility, but little else apart from recoiling from the calculated violence of human sacrifice.

In your post yesterday you say:


"What we find is not so much Bataille 'on' Nietzsche, but perhaps 'after' or 'through' Nietzsche. At least, it is not incidental to the text that we witness Bataille's own transformation within it: rather, this transformation is its object."

I must admit that insight, Bataille's own transformation is the object of the reading, had not occured to me. I had stopped reading On Nietzsche because I was getting nowhere with it. I was working on reading Bataille 'on' Nietzsche. My reading had reached a dead end and I just chucked it. It was literature not philosophy and I had no background in French literature, and little by way of a working acquaintance with French philosophy.

If I relate Bataille to my personal crisis, then I can make some headway. Thus in Chapter 10, part 2, Bataille writes:


"Having said goodbye to worries about the future with a blasphemous oath --I lose all reason for existing, in fact, all reason period. I lose the possibility of speaking. Especially speaking as I am now of summit morality is something ridiculous." (p.37)

That's me. I have lost my speaking in my personal life. I have become silent. I only speak in work and in public. I am emotionally closed down and silent in my perosnal life. I sense death and being lost.

Unlike Bataille I have not said goodbye to my worries about the future as I am deeply concerned about getting another job in the next six months, and moving away from the constrictive mode of life of Adelaide.

However, I sense the wound of insufficiency, the anxiety at the heart of being in-the-world, and the frustration with the limits of our existence. And I understand the moral summit of sacrifice. I understand the ritual of violence, as I am employing it to break free of the fears associated with a provincal mode of life. I currently live the intense experience that tears beings apart and I am unable to adequately express that intense experience.

Okay, I can emotionally connect with that.

It is here that I have my doubts.

I can emotionally connect with that, both from my experiences in my personal life and from living the political life---imagine the ecstasy of the Liberal/National Party and the utter desolation of the ALP in Canberra next week.

Bataille, it seems, is all about putting himself through the emotional wringer big time. This kind of struggling with one's demons is a very Catholic way of being-in-the-world. It is not one that I have much time for myself since it is all about suffering and being truely miserable.

It is all about anguish, guilt and torment as the pathway to moral experience. It is all so dam Christian, so individualistic, as it makes the anguish and pain one's own.

And so passive in the face of the meaninglessness of European nihilism. And so accepting of anguish.


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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:27 PM | | Comments (0)
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