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Georges Bataille
56 quotes
“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today, I am overjoyed at being an object of horror and repugnance to the one being whom I am bound to... The blank head in which ‘I’ am has become so frightened and greedy that only my death could satisfy it.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All that I had loved during my life rose up like a graveyard of white tombs, in a lunar, spectral light. Fundamentally, this graveyard was a brothel. The funereal marble was alive. In some places it had hair on it.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I used to shut my eyes and let it shine redly through my lids. The sun was fantastic – it evoked dreams of explosion. Was there anything more sunlike than red blood running over cobblestones, as though light could shatter and kill? Now, in this thick darkness, I’d made myself drunk with light.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was jealous of people with a God to hang onto, whereas I … soon all I’d have left would be ‘eyes to cry with’.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can grovel at His feet if I believe He doesn’t exist.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sank into the moist body the way a well-guided plough sinks into earth. The earth beneath that body lay open like a grave; her naked cleft lay open to me like a freshly dug grave... our bodies were quivering like two rows of teeth chattering together.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had porcelain-blue eyes that even in a lighted railway car were lost in the clouds, as if he had personally heard the Valkyries’ summons; but no doubt his ear was more attuned to the trumpet-call of the barracks.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each peal of music in the night was an incantatory summons to war and murder. The drum rolls were raised to their paroxysm in the expectation of an ultimate release in bloody salvos of artillery.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Against this rising tide of murder, far more incisive than life (because blood is more resplendent in death than in life), it will be impossible to set anything but trivialities – the comic entreaties of old ladies.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can we linger over books to which their authors have manifestly not been driven? ... the freakish anomalies of Blue of Noon originated entirely in an anguish to which I was prey.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Appendix: The Author’s Foreword [1957]
“The big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the (chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan).”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human foot is commonly subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rickety. In an imbecilic way it is doomed to corns, calluses, and bunions.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love expresses a need for sacrifice each unity must lose itself in some other which exceeds it. In erotic frenzy the being is led to tear itself apart and lose itself.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no communication more profound,” he claims. “[T]wo beings are lost in a convulsion that binds them together. But they only communicate when losing a part of themselves. Communication ties them together with wounds, where their unity and integrity dissipate in fever.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone wanting slyly to avoid suffering identifies with the entirety of the universe, judges each thing as if he were it. In the same way, he imagines, at bottom, that he will never die. We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have in fact only two certainties in this world—that we are not everything and that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic, an unbreathable void reveals itself. I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: “I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep.” From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, than 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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The advance of intelligence diminished, as a secondary consequence, the “possible” in a realm which appeared foreign to intelligence: that of inner experience. To say “diminished” is even to say too little. The development of intelligence leads to a drying up of life which, in return, has narrowed intelligence. It is only if I state this principle: “inner experience itself is authority” that I emerge from this impotence.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philosophy … finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Concern for this or that limited good can sometimes lead to the summit... But this occurs in a roundabout way. Moral ends … are distinct from any excesses they occasion. States of glory and moments of sacredness surpass results intentionally sought.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn’t develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote “with his blood,” and criticizing, or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one’s lifeblood. … It was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is whole only when it isn’t subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Entirety exists within me as exuberance … in empty longing … in … the desire to burn with desire.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The total person is first disclosed … in areas of life that are lived frivolously.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning—and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts... People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return] is what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every other system, don’t forget, these moments are viewed as means: Every moral system proclaims that “each moment of life ought to be motivated.” Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others’ ends.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To choose evil is to choose freedom—“freedom, emancipation from all restraint.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can’t rely on anything. Except ourselves. Ludicrous responsibility devolves on us, overwhelms us. In every regard, right up the present, people always have relied on each other—or God.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All eroticism has a sacramental character.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Inevitably linked with the moment of climax, there is a minor rupture suggestive of death; and conversely the idea of death may play a part in setting sensuality in motion.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities is no longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness, but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadvantage. Literature (fiction) took the place of what had formerly been the spiritual life; poetry (the disorder of words) that of real states of trance. Art constituted a small free domain, outside action: to gain freedom it had to renounce the real world. This is a heavy price to pay, and most writers dream of recovering a lost reality. They must then pay in another sense, by renouncing freedom.”
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Bataille Reader (1997), p. 340