Gary,

It sounds as if you're assuming a stable "self," or selves -- one external, one interior -- into which Bataille enters in order to attain the inner experience, which is itself some sort of a step into the inner core. I may be wrong, but I don't think Bataille's notion rests upon this kind of binary structure. On the contrary, I think that if it is followed to its logical conclusion, the inner experience is better seen as an incessant but forever incomplete dissolution of the self.

Gary you write;
"What is the point of doing this? What is the point of turning inward to the world of pain, memories of past suffering, psychological distortions and projections to deal with the damage and pain. It does not seem to be about healing the psychological damage so that we can become more healthy."

It's about finding out what the wounds within you look like...soon enough you realize that the reason why you feel things is directly related to a wound within you, the reason why I come here to read your posts, the reason why I'm attracted to a certain individual, etc...People say "Ah, that person is attractive"...well she's only as attractive as you allow her to be...now what is this wound within you that makes you allow her to appear attractive...?

Pain and damage do not connote territories we must seek escape from but rather fundamental states of emotions that are as much part of you as your desire for well-beingness peacefulness and tranquility...Quantitively we may ask, is there more pain or more well-beingness? Does 'healthy' imply less suffering? Or is suffering as healthy as non-suffering? Turning inwards seems like the only way to find answers to these questions, or at least, to try to find them.

I'm sorry, I'm not academically educated in philosophy but is this representative of some kind of existentialism? I read Bataille and I feel his struggle is the same as mine and I've never read Nietzsche.

So what is the point of doing this? What else but to understand being?

Chris,
You are dead right. I was thinking of the classic Freudian psychoanalytic subject.

What Bataille is doing is destroying the liberal subject, breaking it down, dissolving it. The dissolution is undertaken to make contact with the sacred.

Your point about my inner/outer binary structure is reaffirmed by Amy Hollywood in her 'Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History'. She says:

"For Bataille, the contradiction between objective and subjective, like that between the fictional and the autobiographical, allows his theoretical texts themselves to become 'operations' of ecstasy; they continually erect and overturn distinctions between 'experience' and 'theory,' 'subjective' and 'objective,' 'inner' and 'outer,' making the writing of theory itself an erotic, mystical, religious exercise."

I guess I have trouble understanding Christian mysticism.

Alex,

You write:
"is this representative of some kind of existentialism? I read Bataille and I feel his struggle is the same as mine and I've never read Nietzsche."

I'm more inclined to the view that Bataille is working in the (female) Christian mystical tradition than existentialism.

I know nothing about this tradition.The names I come across are Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Teresa of Avila (d. 1582) and Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. ca. 1275). I have not read their texts.

I think it's also worth keeping in mind that Bataille was writing amidst the surrealists, though he was most often at odds with them for their implicit affirmation of a traditional idealism. I'm being reductive, but ... where surrealism found a certain "beauty" in the grotesque and shocking, Bataille vigilantly avoids such resolutions.

I tend to see Bataille's interest in Christian mysticism as a kind of paralell to surrealist excavations of classical materials. But Bataille, writing after Hegeal and Nietzsche, which is to say, after the death of God, does not find an elevation to beatitude in the excessive thralls of the mystics. Instead, he encounters an experience which is altogether beyond the realms of reason and unreason. Blanchot, commenting on Bataile's notion of "inner experience," puts it clearly: "the interior experience is the manner in which this radical negation, a negation that has nothing more to negate, is affirmed" (IC 205). And then he adds, "the experience is not an outcome. It does not satisfy, it is without value, without sufficiency, and only such that it frees all human possibilities from their meaning" (IC 207).

Chris,
How do the surrealists (presumably Andre Breton)implicitly affirm a traditional idealism?

By retaining the idea of art as beauty? By remaining committed to the values of "literature."?

Were not the Breton Surrealists also preocuppied with inner experience (of unconscious processes)? Did they not embrace and live a vaunted and prodigious bohemianism? Did they not have a fascination with ruins and shock effects and the forlorn and abandoned quarters of modern cities? Did they not celebrate the unconscious and the spontaneity of "automatic writing"? Is this not the European avant garde who wanted to reconnect art and life?

What then are the values of art and literature?

It cannot be an art for arts sake aesthetic, can it? Did idealism have something to do with the way works of art provided the "ideal" or "aesthetic" precipitate of experiences; and left out, withheld or denied the dirty, bloody real-world content.Is that their idealism.

Or has is the mind that makes Breton an idealist and the body that makes Bataille a materialist?