List of Georges Bataille Quotes

Though The Immediate Impression Of Rebellion May Obscure The Fact, The Task Of Authentic Literature Is Nevertheless Only Conceivable In Terms Of A Desire For Fundamental Communication With The Reader.

The Difficulty That Contestation Must Be Done In The Name Of An Authority Is Resolved This: I Contest In The Name Of Contestation What Experience Itself Is.

The Analysis Of Laughter Had Opened To Me Points Of Contact Between The Fundamentals Of A Communal And Disciplined Emotional Knowledge And Those Of Discursive Knowledge.

Inner Experience ... Is Not Easily Accessible And, Viewed From The Outside By Intelligence, It Would Even Be Necessary To See In It A Sum Of Distinct Operations, Some Intellectual, Others Aesthetic, Yet Others Moral. ... It Is Only From Within, Lived To The Point Of Terror, That It Appears To Unify That Which Discursive Thought Must Separate.

What Causes [fragmentation] If Not A Need To Act That Specializes Us And Limits Us To The Horizon Of A Particular Activity? Even If It Turns Out To Be For The General Interest (which Generally Isn't True), The Activity That Subordinates Each Of Our Aspects To A Specific Result Suppresses Our Being As An Entirety. Whoever Acts Substitutes A Particular End For What He Or She Is, As A Total Being.

Nothing Radically Changes When Instead Of Human Satisfaction, We Think Of The Satisfaction Of Some Heavenly Being! God's Person Displaces The Problem And Does Not Abolish It.

The Preceding Criticism Justifies The Following Definition Of The Entire Human: Human Existence As The Life Of "unmotivated" Celebration, Celebration In All Meaning Of The Word: Laughter, Dancing, Orgy, The Rejection Of Subordination, And Sacrifice That Scornfully Puts Aside Any Consideration Of Ends, Property, And Morality.

It Is Through An "intimate Cessation Of All Intellectual Operations" That The Mind Is Laid Bare. If Nor, Discourse Maintains It In Its Little Complacency. ... The Difference Between Inner Experience And Philosophy Resides Principally In This: That In Experience, ... What Counts Is No Longer The Statement Of Wind, But The Wind.

An Intention That Rejects What Has No Meaning In Fact Is A Rejection Of The Entirety Of Being.

Naturally, Love's The Most Distant Possibility.

By Inner Experience I Understand That Which One Usually Calls Mystical Experience: The States Of Ecstasy, Of Rapture, At Least Of Meditated Emotion. But I Am Thinking Less Of Confessional Experience, To Which One Has Had To Adhere Up To Now, That Of An Experience Laid Bare, Free Of Ties, Even Of An Origin, Of Any Confession Whatever. This Is Why I Don't Like The Word Mystical.

Humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, Which Is Only A Single And Fragmentary Aspect Of Humanity, Will Itself Be Changed In Humanity-as-entirety.