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February 3, 2005
I would say that Bataille is an atheistic mystic who responds to the modern chasm between a theological Christian doctrine and a privatised lived spirituality that participates in the "nothingness" beyond all signifiers, and which transgresses all boundaries in a desolate nihilistic world.
So what does that mean?
Here is something to consider. It is an abstract of a paper on Bataille, religion and Nietzsche by Jim Urpeth that may be of some help. Jim says:
"Bataille's thought constitutes the most significant manifestation and development of the religious dimension of Nietzsche's thought. Following Nietzsche, Bataille offers a religious critique of Christianity. Central to Bataille´s perspective is the identification of a specifically religious form of 'eroticism' or self-expenditure. Bataille explores the affectivity of this 'religious eroticism' which he describes in terms of the interplay of 'anxiety' and 'joy' that characterises the 'experience' of the 'limit' or the transition across ontological planes he variously terms 'continuity' and 'discontinuity' or 'intimacy' and the 'order of things'. For Bataille a key religious phenomenon in this respect is 'mysticism', the states of ecstatic self-loss that characterises 'divine love'. Bataille valorises the 'sovereignty' of the mystics who, determined by the most fundamental processes of energetic matter, live beyond utility in disregard of 'project'. The key themes of this aspect of Bataille's thought, which resonate with elements of ... Nietzsche's ...thought are 'un-knowing' and 'communication'. However, in contrast to Nietzsche, Bataille .... offers an immanent critique of Christianity, which affirms traces of the 'sacred' within its predominantly 'profane' orientation."
What does this give us?
Well, we have a conscious reworking of Nietzsche's conception of Dionysus as opposed to Christ; and the idea of sacrifice [as] an ongoing quest for liberative potentials in the conjunction of violence and an atheistic 'religious spirit'. The Dionysian is affirmed in opposition to the Apollinian world of christian love and the crystalline beauty of a mathematically ordered, harmonious cosmos.
Then we have bodily function opposed to the head repressing and harnessing for utilitarian ends the free flow of vital forces. The affirmation of the body is also an embrace the Dionysian, as the unsubordinated expenditure of desire in laughter and tears, ecstasy and madness, vice and revolt, eroticism and death.
How then does this constitute a religion without a god in Bataille's hands?
The duality of the "sacred" and the "profane" in this Dionysisian celebration operate in terms of the elevated acts of profanation or desecration becoming singular mystical moments of Oneness with the All. The act of willfully violating taboos offers privileged access to the holy or sacred.
It is the nothingness that resonates. Bataille's lacerating" form of meditation (spirtual exercises) aims to induce a catastrophic dissolution of the self. It is only in such moments that Bataille could experience ecstasy and a form of communion. So he sought to plunge himself into nothingness: Here is his description of the resulting experience in Inner Experience:
"Contemplating night, I see nothing, love nothing. I remain immobile, frozen, absorbed in IT. I can imagine a landscape of terror, sublime, the earth open as a volcano, the sky filled with fire, or any other vision capable of "putting the mind into ecstasy"; as beautiful and disturbing as it may be, night surpasses this limited 'possible' and IT is nothing, there is nothing in IT which can be felt, not even finally darkness. In IT, everything fades away, but, exorbitant, I traverse an empty depth and the empty depth traverses me. In IT, I communicate with the "unknown" opposed to the ipse which I am; I become ipse, unknown to myself, two terms merge in a single wrenching, barely differing from a void -- not able to be distinguished from it by anything that I can grasp -- nevertheless differing from it more than does the world of a thousand colors." (pp.124-225)
That is a mystical experience of the void in which there is a fusion of subject and object.
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Sounds like a really interesting essay. Apparently it was published in a book that emerged from the conference, Nietzsche and the Divine. Unfortunately for me, there's no copy in the La Trobe library.