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| BATAILLE |
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Georges Bataille
"In art, man returns to sovereignty (to the expiration of desire) and- if it is at first the desire to annul desire- barely has it arrived at its goals, than it is the desire to rekindle desire."
"From one hour to the next, I become sick at the idea that I am writing, that I must pursue. Never do I have security, certainty. Continuity horrifies me. I persevere in disorder, loyal to the passions of which I really know nothing, which upset me in every sense."
"The museum is a colossal mirror in which man contemplates himself, in short, in all his aspects, finds himself literally admirable and abandons himself to the ecstasy expressed in all the art journals."
"It is in this tragic, artificial world, that ecstasy arises. Without a single doubt, all object of ecstasy is created by art. All 'mystical knowledge' is founded on the belief in the revealing value of ecstasy. It would be necessary, on the contrary, to regard it as a fiction, as analogous, in a certain sense, to the intuitions of art."
"I make demands- around me extends the void, the darkness of the real world- I exist, I remain blind, in anguish: other individuals are completely different from me, I feel nothing of what they feel. If I envisage my coming into the world- linked to the birth then to the union of a man and a woman, and even, at the moment of their union…a single chance decided the possibility of this self which I am: in the end, the mad improbability of the sole being without whom, for me, nothing would be, becomes evident. Were there the smallest difference in the continuity of which I am the end point: instead of me eager to be me, there would be with respect to me only nothingness, as if I were dead."
"Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown. Knowledge is access to the unknown. Nonsense is the outcome of every possible sense."
"Nothing…is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended. Nothing is more foreign to our way of thinking than the earth in the middle of the silent universe and having neither the meaning that man gives things, nor the meaninglessness of things as soon as we try to imagine them without a consciousness that reflects them."
"The obsession with metamorphosis can be defined as a violent need- identical , furthermore, with all our animal needs- that suddenly impels us to cast off the gestures and attitudes requisite to human nature. A man in an apartment, for example, will set to groveling before those around him and eat dog's food. There is, in every man, an animal thus imprisoned, like a galley slave, and there is a gate, and if we open the gate, the animal will rush out, like the slave finding his way to escape. The man falls dead, and the beast acts as a beast, with no care for the poetic wonder of the dead man. Thus man is seen as a prison of bureaucratic aspect."
"But it is human to search, from lure to lure, for a life that is at last autonomous and authentic."
"Sovereignty designates the movement of free and internally wrenching violence that animates the whole, dissolves into tears, into ecstasy and into bursts of laughter, and reveals the impossible in laughter, ecstasy, or tears. But the impossible thus revealed is not an equivocal position; it is the sovereign self-consciousness that, precisely, no longer turns away from itself."
"Nietzsche's thought, which resulted in the sudden ecstatic vision of the eternal return, cannot be compared to the feelings habitually linked to what passes for profound reflection. For the object of the intellect here exceeds the categories in which it can be represented, to the point where as soon as it is represented it becomes an object of ecstasy- an object of tears, an object of laughter…The toxic character of the 'return' is even of such great importance that, if for an instant it were set aside, the formal content of the 'return' might appear empty."
"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."
"The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives."
"When all has happened thus, what meaning remains for art or criticism? Can we even maintain that in these conditions, art alone will explain the sound of crowds within the exhibition halls? Vincent Van Gogh belongs not to art history, but to the bloody myth of our existence as humans. He is of that rare company who, in a world spellbound by stability, by sleep, suddenly reached the terrible 'boiling point' without which all that claims to endure becomes insipid, intolerable, declines. For this 'boiling point' has meaning not only for him who attains it, but for all, even though all may not yet perceive that which binds man's savage destiny to radiance, to explosion, to flame, and only thereby to power."
"Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it."
"Therefore an attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man. Currently, an entire earthly activity, and undoubtedly the most intellectually outstanding, tends, through the denunciation of human dominance, in this direction. Hence, however strange this may seem when a creature as elegant as the human being is involved, a path- traced by the painters- opens up toward bestial monstrosity, as if there were no other way of escaping the architectural straitjacket."
"Dust.- The storytellers have not realized that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spiders' webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses. Meanwhile dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them: as if it were a matter of making ready attics and old rooms for the imminent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odor of old dust nourishes and intoxicates."
"Most materialists, despite wanting to eliminate all spiritual entities, ended up describing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it out as specifically idealist. They have situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy of diverse types of facts, without realizing that in this way they have submitted to an obsession with an ideal form of matter, with a form which approaches closer than any other to that which matter should be."
"It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all men . . . that alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms."
"Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things."
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