I'm continuing to read the diary section of Bataille's On Nietzsche. He continues to dig away into his subjectivity, into his feelings, beliefs and desires. If we ignore all the God talk about absolutes, celestial glories and the universe, then bits of his reflections about his inner experience do make sense. I can connect with, and understand, some of them, even though I think that mysticism is a temptation to be avoided.

In chapter 5 of the diary Bataille says:

"I hate lies (poetic nonsense). But the desire within us has never lied. There's a sickness in desire that oftern makes us perceive some gap between the object imagined and the real object. It's true, the beloved individual differs from the conception I have of that individual. What's worse: to identify the real wth the object of desire it seems, presupposes extraordinary luck." (p.69)

It seems to similar to what psychoanalysis means by projection: a cutting off what the super-ego perceives as "bad" aspects of oneself (e.g. weakness or aggression) and projecting them onto someone else "over there" where they can be condemned, punished, etc. It is associated with, and constructed in part by, the repression of that which is too painful to remain in consciousness. It is this kind of unconscious projection that determines our behavior, especially in personal relationships.

Bataille does not seem to have any sense of philosophy as a healing art that tries to cure us of the beliefs and desires that make us sick and cause us to live such miserable lives. It is the gap between the object imagined or projected and the real object as the individual human being makes us miserable. If we are being judged in terms of the good projection we are always seen to be inferior; if we are judged by the bad projectionwe are seen negatively, and so need to be punished and attacked as threatening.

This diary is more than romantic self-expression. Being the good Catholic Bataille abolishes the tormenting absence of his lover until he can possess her under his roof. He accepts that carnal love involves excesses of suffering, and accepts the bitterness, anguish and torment, knowing that he only reach his love in a few moments of chance. The excess is what makes him alive. He wants to experience the pain. It seems that he accepts that we are castrated, lacking, lacerated and split anway. So lets up the pain.

Another way of reading this is that Bataille is being made sick by the poisons inside him. Bataille is a soul in distress entrapped in torment. His suffering body needs healing byremoving some of the poisonous projections and tormenting desires. But Bataille turns away from the therapy offered by psychoanalysis to intensifyhis own torment.

Though he has moved beyond the traditional Catholic disgust with his bodily desires Bataille remains trapped in his obsessions of love. For Bataille personal erotic love has come to replace religion as bearing the weight for his longings for transcendence, for mysterious union. All that desire and passion flows to the heavens into the sacred. In this religion of love we have obsession, madness, attempted escape and death. Yet Bataille sees no need for therapy: no need to expose the myths and delusions that prevent us from relating to one another in less destructive ways.

He welcomes the pain. The writing is about pain. He loads up the pain. Just like a good mediaeval Christian mystic.

What do we make of this lack of desiring to get well? Bataille is sick so why does he not want to get well?

I recoil from Bataille, as he has no desire to heal himself. I distrust the violence. Is the "ecstatic anguish," more a form of masochism?

Bataille does whip up the intensity of the emotional pain, just like a mystic. I read this as a perverted Catholic impulse toward sacrifice, ritual and excess. But the violence overflows the limits of mysticism.

Bataille is writing pain. So argues Amy Hollywood in her Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Writing pain is Bataille's response to history. Meditation on pain is a way of dissolving subjectivity by inducing a constructed traumatic experience.

Hollywood argues that in this response to history Bataille's texts become 'operations' of ecstasy; they continually erect and overturn distinctions between 'experience' and 'theory,' 'subjective' and 'objective,' 'inner' and 'outer.' The writing of the text is an erotic, mystical, religious exercise; a writing based on a conception of mystical speech that assumes the ultimate futility of language and embraces absence and paradox in the place of meaning.

Why the desire to dissolve subjectivity? As a way of moving beyond the scientistic Enlightenment's dualism? So why the violence? Why value suffering in such an intense excessive form that one sails dangerously close to the line that signifies the serial killer?