I dipped back into Bataille this morning after I read this lovely post over at mezomian community? on community. I decided I'd go crude. So Bataille viruently opposes a positivist scientific reason with eroticism, the body and mysticism. Let's stick with this stark dualism as away of reading Bataille.

Or rather, I should say that I picked up Denis Hollier's Against Architecture, rather than read Bataille. I couldn't stomach returning to On Nietzsche. Hollier says:

Philosophy's precise function lies, according to Bataille, in this empire of theory where all the ideological practices limiting language to an instrumental function are gathered. Philosophy's special domain is the trash cans of science. Philsophers, sciences garbage men, eliminate or recuperate its refuse, reducing it to nothing or boiling down to samness.

Science, in the course of its development, produces waste products that upset it...Philsophy's task is to demonstrate that there is nothing threatening about them, either because they are not, in fact, foreign at all, and do escape science's jurisdiction; or because they have no reality ...What is essential is that nothing exists outside fo a theoretical horizon; nothing escapes examination in the distancing that is theory; nothing exists that cannot be mentioned, that has no name, that cannot be subsumed into some conceptual abstraction.