/lit/ - Literature

>>18739819
Check out Surya's biography if you want more details, but he quit seminary as a young man and became a medieval librarian instead, as well as a coomer, anti-surrealist, anti-fascist, nihilist, and mysticist. The death of god for him was thus quite lived in a Nietzschean sense, and he was one of Nietzsche's better interpreters.

>>18739819
I'd recommend the book "Saints of the impossible Bataille, Weil, and the politics of the sacred" by Alexander Irwin, as it relates Simone Weil's way of thinking with Bataille (she was a Jesus loving mystic). It's a short but insightfull book.

>>18739819
>Some call him a "Catholic (albeit sinful) philosopher" and some call him "an enemy of the Church."
>What was he?
Well I'll tell you where he is right now: in Hell.

>>18739854
Sounds like a fag.

>>18739944
Was married twice and his ex-wife kept his surname even after marrying Lacan, and their daughter also got Bataille's surname.

>>18739854
>anti-fascist, anti-antisemite
If what I heard about Bataille's being a crypto-fascist is false then this is why Sade will always be the ultimate paradigm of Evil and Bataille just a second-rate larper. Anyhow he still interests me and I know there will be worth shit in his works, after all, we share an admiration for Sade.

>>18740114
Communists began to call everyone with whom they disagreed fascists during Bataille's time, and Bataille was party to discussions of the possibility of a 'sur-fascism' in the sense of 'sur-realism'. Basically since he diverged from french communists on some issues and took an interest in Nietzsche and in myth and mysticism, writing about both during the war itself, some opponents called him a fascist. I don't think Nietzscheans are obsessed with doing shit for teh evulz so I doubt you'll get that from Batailles non-coomer output, but obviously the erotica would be closer to Sade than his philosophical or political writings.

>>18739819
Bataille is Catholic in the same way Marx is a Hegelian.

He operates within a Christian/Platonic ontology but without accepting the moral foundationalism that the One is good and beautiful. If God is an unknowable beyond/non being from whom being flows out from in creation/emanation, then how are we justified in assigning humanist moral qualities like "good and beautiful" to this inherently dark unknowable unknown?

The unknowable (ineffable) God beyond being is, instead of being a lovey dovey font of everything warm and fluffy in the universe and providing an uplifting humanist teleology of theosis/henosis and universal reconciliation, rather becomes something terrifying, morally unknowable and amoral, that threatens to maliciouisly destroy and consume us in a universal annihilation. Instead of a teleology of reuniting with the good and the beautiful, we have a life of wasting an unknowable God's excess energy and then annihilation into his non-being. Instead of the generosity of the superabdunent overflowing of being being a quality of God's goodness, it becomes an overflowing of excess waste energy of an unknowable dark God that is meaninglessly spent on a sumptuary luxury existence without moral purpose or meaning, and furthermore where the ultimate luxury waste spending of energy is war.

Hence he is Catholic or Platonic, but without the moral underpinnings of Catholic-Platonism it becomes something very dark.

Bataille was a medieval librarian by training, hence the additional Catholic orienatation his views are informed by.

>>18740239
This post here >>18740242 expresses well what I expect from Bataille—I appreciate a lot your post, anon. It is this. I acknowledge the Evil in God through the boehmian theosophy, which is expressed by His Primordial Will and which will be manifest in creation, this Will/Evil as the ever-consuming, entropic transience and annihilation of all things. A will that is always consuming and remaining empty. Few understand this in the same way few understand suffering and love, Divine Evil and Divine Good is one single Fire. This is how I intend to integrate sadean gnosticism, bataillean nihilism, Nietzschean sadism with Christianity.

>>18740340
Bataille has an essay called Base Materialism and Gnosticism. Also one on Sade. Make of that what you will, but I don't know that they are compatible with any conventional reading of Christianity. Maybe Spinoza or Indian theology. Both of the essays are translated in Visions of Excess.

>>18740362
Is this Base Materialism and gnosticism in his Visions of Excess? The Sade one I suppose is the one from Literature and Evil, right? But yes, it is not a very conventional reading of Christianity, or rather, just a too esoteric one. Did Dante not put on the inscrption on the gate of hell ''Eternal love made me''?

>>18740419
They are both in that collection, yes. To me someone either believes in Christianity or they don't. There's no more clerical authority anymore to curb idiosyncratic readings but regardless it sounds like you're going way off.

>The story revolves around pious, young Pierre (Louis Garrel) who has just left a Catholic boarding school to live with his wealthy parents at their villa on the island of Gran Canaria. Pierre's father (Philipe Duclos) dies, leaving his mother Hélène (Isabelle Huppert) to care for him. While in a restaurant, his mother reveals to him that she had been unfaithful to her husband many times with his knowledge and feels no shame about it. She then insists that her son accept her promiscuous ways. Soon after this, Pierre finds a closet full of his father's pornography. His reaction is to furiously masturbate and then to urinate on the magazine pages.

>Hélène encourages her uninhibited sex partner Réa (Joana Preiss) to have sex with Pierre. She does so in public at Gran Canaria's Yumbo Centrum, a popular shopping and nightlife complex. Hélène looks on longingly as the partially clothed couple copulates with passersby raising no objections.

>Afterwards, Hélène includes her son in an orgy with her friends, including Hansi (Emma de Caunes). After the orgy, Hélène decides that she must leave her son to travel. While saying goodbye to Pierre, she implies that something taboo has happened between them and that she must leave to prevent it from happening again.

>Upon Hélène's departure, Hansi enters Pierre's life as a friend. She admits befriending Pierre at Hélène's encouragement but denies receiving a fee from her. Their friendship blossoms into a tender romance and they both fall in love. During their relationship, Hansi reveals that she has participated in sado-masochistic sex many times as a dominatrix with her friend Loulou (Jean-Baptiste Montagut) as the willing masochist. She adds Hélène arranged these encounters as sexual exhibitions for tourists.

>Hélène returns home with Réa. Upon arriving, she finds her son and Hansi socializing at a bar near the villa. Hélène and Pierre greet each other and chat while gazing into each other's eyes, with Hansi looking on jealously. Hélène invites her son to sleep with her. He agrees.

>Hélène and Pierre enter the house's wine cellar. Hélène asks her son to cut her abdomen with a razor while he masturbates and as he climaxes she slits her own throat. Paramedics take away her body. Pierre says good-bye to his mother before the cremation. He enters the room where she lies in state and masturbates exclaiming that he does not want to die as he is carried out.

>>18740456
I just think Christ is too much for us and any type of Christianity is already going way off. Not saying there has never been christians who understood, who felt it, this suffering, but that even non-christians, anti-christians could have faced it, unknowingly.

>>18740479
>too much for us
Ahhh, is he perhaps a surplus that requires gainless expenditure?

>>18739854
>>18740114
Bataille said that he rejects both communism and fascism

>>18739819
>every academic seems to have a contradictory opinion of his relationship with Catholicism

If you think THAT'S controversial then you haven't read about his relation with his mother.

>>18740465
Reminds of that Japanese guy just screaming: "sex sex sex sex sex sex sex!!!!". These people can't think of anything besides it.

>>18741339
What a faggots. Centrists are scum

>>18741448
He was a partisan on the Left, it's very open in his writings.

>>18741448
>Centrists are scum
He wasn't a centrist and you're falling into the trap of simplifying the spectrum by reducing it all to "the left, the right and the centre" when any pol-sci major will tell you that's hardly the case.

>>18740529
We already do this

>>18741448
I want 2016iggers to leave. You don't even read, so why are you here?

>>18740114
Bataille is quite explicitly communist or anarchist through much of Visions of Excess, later he rejects communism but retains his huge respect and use of Marx's work.

It is furthermore interesting how radical his anti-fascism is, if he lived today he would be in both antifa and blm desu: yes he also writes places about black emancipation already in the interwar period.

>>18739819

Does any books, articles or academic articles about Bataille and Catholicism exist? I would love to read on this topic.

>>18742332
Lmao, Bataille was a cuck indeed. This is expressed even in his retarded group when none of the members had the courage to practice the murder for the sacrificial rite

>>18742332
He choose a side as a young man and kept a partisan loyalty to that faction. The partisanship was strengthened by the fact he lived in an age of civil and international conflict, it was important to have a gang of armed men who you were loyal to who you could also call on, especially once you had committed to one side in youth, helped by the historical fact that his side won. But he spends most of intellectual career justifying why figures on the Right should be respected on the Left, he becomes Nietzsche's supreme apologist against the mood and inclination of his own partisan factions on the Left, and the realities of enormity on the Right. Whatever the historical benefits, his partisanship was an intellectual burden that cut his off from likeminded others and forever placed him on the defence of redeeming Nietzsche from his own iconolast Left who were purging the intellectual world to remake in their own image in victory.

He was a Leftist primarily because of the historical conditions of his own person, in a different era of different conditions, with less need to join an armed band to oppose other armed bands, who knows where his politics would line up. They would be Nietzschean, but it may not be spend trying to get the left to accept Nietzsche because of the partisan loyalties of youth that historical conditions compelled him to stay loyal to. If he hadn't fallen in with Kojeve early, and had rather leap straight to Nietzsche in an era of greater academic freedom and less need for partisanship, or an interent era where every idea can find or create its own petite partisan band online, who knows. Who in the academic left today would support an active Nietzschean pornographer?

>>18742730
Yeah, I genuinely can’t understand how anyone on the left could see Nietzsche with the least appreciation. But I still need to read Deleuze’s take on him (even though I’ll suspect it will be a mild vitalist reading ignoring the force and violence inherent to the Nietzschean spirit).

>>18742682
He was the original kys poster and ahead of his time (or headless, as it were)
>>18742730
I mostly agree with your sentiment but would swap the notion of armed radicals for marxist scholastics. These people were largely not fighters but would snub each other in periodicals. Bataille was a librarian on government payroll.

>>18740114
>Implying Fascists get to appropriate Sade to their camp
Back to your cuckshed

>>18742730
This is simply wrong. For much of Bataille's career Nietzsche had as large an importance in his work as Marx, we are talking about a dude who saw the decapitation of kings as a sacred thing and vowed to never ever shake the hand of an anti Semite as a religious vow. He fucking made a cult around leaderlessness: Acephale is in the middle ages a religious organization without a head - a leader. Furthermore Kojeve's Marxist Hegel is everywhere in Bataille's works. To imagine Bataille as a right authoritarian is simply ridiculous, have you read anything by him?

If I want to accommodate you, then I admit that you can see Italian futurist strains in his work with his occupation with violence, but nothing of the authoritarian part of futurism remains. For Bataille, the glorification of violence is always proletarian, always the slave against the master, the worker against the capitalist, the Spanish anarchist against the fascist.

If you can blame him of authoritarianism it's his excuses for Stalin in the Accursed Share.

>>18742848
>Acephale is in the middle ages a term for religious organization without a head - a leader.
correction

Is there any use in reading this guy if I've never had sex? I do consume a lot of hentai and porn though.

>>18742830
Nah, fascists are just repressed moderns. Sade expressed his exasperation, he is beyond them.

>>18742864
The Accursed Share Vol 1 doesn't really have much of his coomer ideology and is pretty good

>>18742868
What are you talking about retard, Sade was a pro-French Revolution Republican.

>>18740242
good post

>>18742886
He was pro-Feench Revolution as an instrument to his philosophy, the atheistic state which Sade viewed as the consequence of the Revolution was the perfect realm for sadism. Read Klossowski’s book on him.

>>18742975
Nah Klossowski was into all kinds of retarded nonsense like Gnosticism and doesn't deserve to be taken seriously when discussing Sade's naturalist philosophy.

>>18743003
>naturalist philosophy
This is exactly why there underlies gnostic elements in his philosophy. Bataille himself should have been aware of this when he quotes that character in Sade expressing imitation of Nature through Evil.

There should be a filter that turns "gnosticism" into "sneed." No one ever defines what they mean by it but it gets posted regardless.

>>18743013
Gnosticism is larping about le demurge and the aeons. You either are in the naturalist or the supernaturalist camp.

>>18743033
An obscure Christian heresy that thought the Old Testament God was evil. There is a very small but vocal minority tends to obsess about them.

>>18743058
>>18743071
See, these are two different things. In any case, Bataille saw affinities between forms of materialism and gnosticism.

>>18743099
They're the same thing, the OT god is the demiurge for gnostics

>>18743058
The demiurge is the very craftman of the cosmos, nature is his realm. How can you not see this?

>>18743103
Demiurge is Greek for craftsman and in Platonic theology refers to a title of Zeus. Dualism in the sense of an "evil" created world is from Persia. It's not a cut and dry Christian sect.

>>18743033
basado

>>18742848
>Kojeve's Marxist Hegel
It's a Hegelian Hegel. It doesn't need a commitment to Marxism or to the Left that informs the signficance of master/slave dialectics to his work which are contained entirely within Hegel.

The other examples all show the personal emotional nature of a historically conditioned partisanship. He fell in with a group-identity early and stayed loyal to it as a partisan in a time of conflict despite it intellectually stunting him and forcing him on the defence as a Nietzschean. Not shaking peoples hands because of ritual uncleanliness is not an intellectual position, it's a moral sentimentalism of in-group vs out-group identity and othering, an emotive act of in-group loyalty. In a different historical time he would have been conditioned differently. Perhps he would always have thrown himself into causes of excess, excess partisanship in a time of conflict having an appeal to his train of thought, but in an internet age he would have far greater freedom of choice as to what causes of excess he devoted himself to. And if we are to be honest he'd be more likely to be an occultist porn blogger grooming people to join his secret discord server.

Klossowski once recalled, No one was more anti-communist than Bataille.

>>18743915
Communism like capitalism and fascism destroys the sovereignty of the individual and condemns them to a productive ethic where they exist for-production, for-capital and for-nation state - all three systems are for ever-growing productive consumption: what Bataille essentially calls for is a radical sacred anti-modern anarchism where excess is seized by the proletariat and distributed fairly equally according to "to each according to their ability to each according to their need", where the ever-growing expansion of the means of production is halted and where this excess is consumed in ecstacy.

>>18743572
The point of historical materialism is that you cannot completely disassociate theory from its time and environment - i think that Bataille would be the first trans woman on mars if she lived today: these hypotheticals does not make sense. A central core that runs through all Bataille's work is a strong anti-authoritarianism and anti-fascism. If you are gonna argue that Bataille is a fascist I'm gonna call you a schizo, because you must have been hallucinating hardcore when reading Bataille to confuse him as a fascist.

>>18744052
>what Bataille essentially calls for is a radical sacred anti-modern anarchism
Ok promisingly based
>where excess is seized by the proletariat and distributed fairly equally…
Nasty hypocrisy.
Bataille should decide if he wants either a nietzschean dionysian ecstasy or a holy heaven like christian community

>>18744052
>where excess is seized by the proletariat and distributed fairly
Not really the point. The excess can't even be consumed, let alone distributed fairly. He suggests towards the end of Accursed Share vol. that wealthier countries ought to redistribute their surplus to prevent too much of a build up but he isn't really calling for a revolution. He even points out the revolutions have only succeeded against monarchies, i.e. thus far the liberal/capitalist governments are impervious to them, even if the existence of revolutionary states impacts their politics.

>>18744107
Literally every thread has posters seething about transformers even if completely off topic. Meds, now.

>>18744107
>>18744532
Would he be a cute trans?

>>18744950
I don't think he had AGP. He spent an obscene amount of time and money in brothels though, that is to say, having actual sex with actual women, not being an incel wishing he were a woman in order to be sexualized at all.

>>18744514
It's in Notion of Excess where he comes with a much more class-oriented version of the project Accursed Share takes part in.

>>18744477
What I see in his work is more something like the kind of ecstatic community in Vodun and other indigenous and animist notions of expenditure: Here the excess isn't held by an aristocracy or a bourgeoisie but consumed collectively in big, ecstatic and joyful rituals. He seems more fond of the catholic church than the protestant church for this reason, but very much rejects both.

>>18745265
>Notion of Excess
Notion of Expenditure: I was a lil' fast

>>18744052
While Bataille certainly saw more sovereignty in the modern age is the (sub)proletarian, precisely insofar as he might refuse work, or waste its fruits in spending his money on booze, at the same time (or earlier actually), after Contre-Attaque moving into Acéphale, Bataille abandoned the level of the crowd: and then, headless, leaderless, but he was still more interested in a small community set apart - which, per the ideas of the College of Sociology, might impress their ideas onto society. Of course, this experiment of community failed (could only fail, one would say later), but thereafter he never really ventured a (meta)political project. From what direction, in his later writings, was change to come? G.B. at least didn't personally join them.

>>18745265
Just skimmed over that essay. The references to revolution seem kind of forced, as if he wanted to talk about something else—which of course, he eventually does in later works—but needed it to be relevant to a certain audience.

>>18745545
I see the class war in the essay quite essential: unlike Marx Bataille rejects capitalism and embraces the proletarian struggle because capitalism is so goddamn ugly and bleak: Bataille's leftist project is therefore in some sense very aesthetically aristocratic.

>>18745488
Yes Bataille stops being an activist and start being a saint, but he never stops being a leftist. My objective of this discussion is to reject the fascist Bataille narrative and argue that in so far Bataille is political, he is a leftist, maybe petit bourgeois left if you want to be mean .

>>18745991
I don't one could legitimately consider Bataille a (crypto)fascist either. At most it usually comes down to the charges of surfascism (incidentally, Evola was also considered a superfascist) and a fascination, however negative, with the rising fascist power. Though the surrealists made a smear of this, Bataille had spoken of 'defeating fascism with its own weapons' (one of which being the redeployment of myth, that Bataille could've taken from Sorel just as fascists had), though this was always to move beyond fascism - and while Evola wanted to move beyond fascism from the right, for Bataille this was, I agree, from the (non-communist) left.

>>18745991
>because capitalism is so goddamn ugly and bleak
That's the real critique though, that the bourgeosie are cringe, they learned from christianity to hide and hoard their money, no more festivals no more bacchanalia, just reinvesting in exploitation. Any mention of revolution or the proletariat comes across as tired platitude, at least to me, and surely enough his later work focuses on "sovereignty" the most aristocratic of ideals.

>>18746096
It's funny because in all of Bataille's essays on fascism, you can see he clearly hated the idea. Can't really fathom where this accusations of fascism come from.

>>18746171
He wrote about Nietzsche. A lot.

>>18746181
And NIetzsche was no fascist either, so my point stands.

>>18746146
>they learned from christianity to hide and hoard their money,
it was the reformation that fucked everything up not christianity itself, catholics were cool they built all those cool ass temples and fostered the arts, it was Calvin and usury that fucked us, iirc Bataille argues the same too

>>18746188
Well the other people writing about Nietzsche in the 1930s were evul hitlers so the French left would call you names for doing so. Not very bright. Did not get to lead any revolutions themselves. Not bigbrained enough for the overman.
>>18746266
Reformation contributed but the replacement of Greco-Roman public expenditure funded by aristocrats with a church-controlled one is a shift. To be sure the church was also funded by the aristocrats to some degree though it did become independently wealthy, an estate as it were, one which valorized poverty while at the same time condemning the sorts of revelries of expenditure one would associate with the pagans.

>>18742730
>Who in the academic left today would support an active Nietzschean pornographer?
...pretty much most of the academic left today? The modern left is perfectly fine with erotica and Nietzsche.

>>18746188
>>18746436
We should remember that fascism, despite being degenerate, corrupt, still clings to the traditional forms of dominion, aristocracy and oligarchy, rule of a few, militaristic/warrior, active, rule. It could also be added the sense for aesthetics, aestheticization of politics, as Benjamin described the fascist movement.

>>18747223
Do you know why? I want an answer for this, for I see no reasonable justification for any sympathy toward Nietzsche from the part of the left.

>>18742769
>(or headless, as it were)
Nice one.

>>18746436
Plus one of Bataille's main projects was to reclaim Nietzsche from the fascists - one would certainly not call fx. Kaufmann a fascist just for translating Nietzsche: quite the contrary.

>>18740340
>Divine Evil and Divine Good is one single Fire
Presumably as the Black One.

>>18747285
Mainly because N. had been rehabilitated in the mid 20th century, not only by the likes of Kaufmann but especially by Deleuze and Foucault. While the latter were genuinely interested in N., the emphasized the elements of difference, openness, affirmation, interpretation, relativity of truth (also things like force and violence, but it's the other stuff that really stuck). So now all the interest in N. from academic/humanities left is filtered through a poststructural lens, while leaving out the other elements that would make them more uneasy.
Same thing with Bataille to an extent: while he was broadly left and not a fascist, still, the idea that he is self-evidently "one of us" is really because of his posthumous reception and secondary writing on him in academia.

>>18739819
Nice thread. He seems like a very thought provoking man. His anti-antisemitism is a bit cringe (reminds me of Borges), but he seems to be a must read which I'm very interested in. What would be the best book to start with him?

>>18749052
Made a guide in another thread, it was made quite in a rush so some of the spelling is off, but the essays recommended are in Visions of Excess: >>>18706242

First have a knowledge of Marx and Freud

Read some essays by Bataille in this order
The Sacred Conspieracy
Notion Of Expenditure
Solar Anus
The Language of flowers
The old mole
The Jesuve
The Pineal Eye
deviations of nature
Solar Anus again now that it makes sense
His text on Sade
The Psychology of fascism

They can be found in Visions of Excess or at marxists.org and anarchist library.

When that is done read the rest of the essays in visions of excess

After this Bataille's work splits up in two complimentary parts: The Spiritual and the economical/sociological.

To start with the top down economical the accursed share is great, it's just more of notion of expenditure.

For the spiritual you can read Inner Experience and work through Summa Atheologica.

Have fun :)

>>18749176
This is incredible, thank you!

>>18749007
Ah yes, I can see this especially with Kaufmann’s notes. But as you said there are elements that make them uneasy, and I’d say these are the fundamental elements (while, for example, his counter-institutional, immoralism, which are appealing to them, are only secondary, means to Nietzsche’s point).

>>18749007
Deleuze and Foucault took up the Nietzsche mantle after Bataille and Klossowski btw

>>18749285
Thank you for the appreciation :)

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>>18750227
no u

Any recs for contemporary Batailleans?

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