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February 2, 2005
Bataille's Inner Experience, like his latter On Nietzsche, has a fragmentary form and consists of a mixture of diverse genres. These link the text back to both the texts of the medieval female Christian mystics (eg., Angela of Foligno) and to those of Nietzsche.
Bataille writes in Inner Experience:
"This book is a tale of despair...Like a marvellous madwomen, death unceasingly opened or closed the gates of the possible. In this maze,I could lose myself at will, give myself over to rapture, but I could also at will discern the paths,provide a precise passage for intellectual steps...Everything was giving way.I awakened before a new enigma, one I knew to be insolvable. The enigma was so bitter, it kept me in an impotence so overwhelming, that I experienced it as God, if he were to exist, would experience it."
This is a world of anguish and ecstasy, of revelation and suffering that link to, and mine, the female mystical texts.
Bataille couples the Christian mystics and Nietzsche. He rigorously defends this coupling, as he argues for a mystical and ecstatic experience in Nietzsche's work.Nietzsche as a mystic?
Dunno. I've always interpreted Nietzsche as a critic of the ascetic/religious hatred of the body and its turn away from this-worldly life. But Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra is infused with religious motifs and as Tyler Roberts indicates there are tensions in Nietzsche's texts:
"Nietzsche denounces the deep roots of the ascetic ideal in the west, yet with his ideas about "great suffering," discipline, and practices of body and spirit, pronounces his own asceticism. Nietzsche is extremely suspicious of intoxication and views the mystical path as a flight from the world, yet in the figures of Zarathustra and Dionysus he inscribes ecstasy deeply into his texts."
If Nietzsche's texts are interpreted from this perspective then wecan say that Nietzsche´s hostility to Christianity does not spring from an antipathy to 'religious experience' per se. As Jim Urpeth observes:
"Indeed the theme of 'affirmation' [in Nietzsche] is of an intrinsically 'religious' character which contests Platonic-Christian appropriation of the 'divine'. Nietzsche reconceives transcendence in immanent rather than transcendent terms on the basis of the recovery of the 'healthy' religious sensibility he detects in the ancient Greeks. For Nietzsche the 'noble' religious affectivity of the pre-Socratic Greeks is quite distinct from that which constitutes Christianity."
Okay that's Nietzsche, Bataille has a case. What then of the mystics and Bataille?
What mystics and Bataille have in common is their concern to negate their self so fully that the self is lost. Is Bataille a mystic?
Many would say no. They would argue that, despite all proximities between Bataille's texts and those of the mystics, they differ in their aims or aimlessness. First, Bataille is not a Christian. Secondly, whereas the mystics' path ends with the divine encounter, Bataille renounces all objects, aims, or end for his quest and his desire. Thirdly, Bataille also rejects all idealism and any hope for salvation. He rejects idealism as it refuses the real physical world and its physical truth.
I'm not so sure. Csn you not have a post-Christian mysticism?
What I do understand is that Bataille had to find a way of speaking to a world different from a world full of idealism. Hence the turn to the body. Hence the turn to the ecstasy of pain and suffering.
But he also seems to follow the writing strategy of female Christian mystics, such as Teresa of Avila or the writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg. Instead of the sacrifice and redemption of religion we have the sacrifice and redemption of writing.
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Does he 'reject' it or does he seek it but never finds it? Does he consider it?