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Georges Bataille and the Fate of the Sacred

Stuart Kendall

Summa Atheologica and the experience of the sacred

During World War Two, the French writer Georges Bataille – then in his mid-40s –
published three books that have in the intervening years been recognized as classics of
philosophical theology, Inner Experience (1943), Guilty (1944), and On Nietzsche (1945).
The books outline Bataille’s experience of what he calls, among other things, the
“impossible,” “inner experience,” or, in perhaps more accessible terms, the “absence of god.”

From 1945 until the end of his life, Bataille continued to write and lecture on this topic,
adding a variety of texts to the series. In 1950, he began to refer to the body of work under
the general title, La Somme athéologique, or, following but inverting the title of St. Thomas
Aquinas’ opus, the summa atheologica. I collected these additional texts in The Unfinished
System of Nonknowledge.

These incredibly rich works sketch, among other things, Bataille’s atheology, a compelling
alternative to the major theological options open to us today: religious faith, religious
fanaticism, and rational atheism. Like his early friend and mentor the Russian religious
philosopher, Lev Shestov, Bataille rejects both the comforts of traditional faith and the
comforts of rational atheism. In their place, he offers the impossible, the absence of god: a
convulsive experience of shattering but ultimately rapturous self-loss. This experience –
inner experience – provides the groundless foundation for an understanding of the sacred
rooted in lived, human experience.

Bataille tracked this experience in his works and in his life through an extraordinarily wide
array of forms and contexts, from the aesthetic to the erotic by way of the religious. His
writings range from novels and poetry to criticism of the literary and visual culture to
anthropology and political economy, always circling around the central figure – forever
displaced – of expenditure and loss, whether psychological, interpersonal, communal, or
cosmological.

I am interested in tracing Bataille’s experience of the sacred without god, describing his
experience of inner experience, against the background of his influences and within the
context of his times.
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Religion is not the sacred

Before we begin and indeed preliminary to this journey, we must, I think, acknowledge a
fundamental conceptual and practical distinction between religion and the experience of the
sacred.
For our purposes here, the word religion describes the outward manifestation of the
experience of the sacred. Religion is also the communal form of the sacred. Religion, then, is a
set of rites and rituals, communal codes and conversations that constitute the outward form
of a particular type of experience, the experience of the sacred.
But this is also to say that – here paraphrasing Bataille – when we use the word
religion to describe the experience of the sacred, we change the experience. When the
experience of the sacred becomes a religious experience, when it can be described or
understood as or codified by the precepts of a given religion, it is no longer quite the same
thing as the experience of the sacred. The experience of the sacred, as I understand it, again
following Bataille, is primary, the religious description or understanding of that experience is
secondary. The experience of the sacred comes first; religion follows.

In Guilty, and using the phrase inner experience for what I’ve been calling sacred experience,
Bataille observed: “Religions are linked to the interrogation of inner experience, more
generally to the interrogation of existence itself. And to end the interrogation of oneself.
They constitute constructions of answers, constructions at the heart of which the
interrogation continues.” (Guilty 220)

Religions, in other words, offer explanations of experiences: explanations that solidify into
communal codes. But the experiences themselves pose questions, particularly the experience
of the sacred.

To speak of the experience of the sacred in this way is to speak of a specific kind of
experience that is possible for a human body, perhaps for all human bodies, though I am not
necessarily convinced of that. It is decidedly not an everyday experience, but rather one that
erupts from within certain experiences, some of which can be anticipated or even provoked,
as in the practice of meditation, but through other means as well.

The phrase “altered state of consciousness” is helpful here. It comes from cognitive
approaches to the study of religious experience, among other applications, though, following
Bataille, I am reluctant to reduce the experience of the sacred to a purely cognitive state, that
is, to a problem of consciousness alone. Altered states of consciousness are as much altered
states of the body as they are of the mind, if not in fact more so.
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What’s more, to the extent that all bodies and states are biologically and temporally distinct,
they are all, at least to some extent, altered states. Bataille would say “monstrous.” There is no
valid norm. That said, the kinds of states of the body and of consciousness that Bataille
seems to have in mind might, for now, be understood as states of peak experience, experiences
of overwhelming rapturous intensity that carry with them a variety of consequences for
human life. Since my purpose today is to explore his attempts to describe these states, I will
not offer more than this preliminary evocation now.

Rather I want to insist, again, on the fundamental precept that we distinguish between
religion – religions, in fact – and the experience of the sacred.

I believe this is a particularly compelling task in our own times – amidst the rise of Christian,
Muslim and other fundamentalist forms of religious life, the renewed vigor of rationalist
atheisms, and, most significantly, the all but utter absence of any compelling communal
model or understanding of the sacred as it relates to contemporary human experience.
Acknowledging – even accepting – the absence of god, what is our experience of the sacred?
How might the experience of the sacred be recast in contemporary culture so as to provide
something like a new structure for discussing and understanding our individual, communal,
and, ultimately, ecological experiences?

These are large questions. Even restricting our inquiry to the work of Georges Bataille, this is
a complicated project with considerations ranging from Bataille’s methods of meditation to
his relationship to mysticism in a comparative context – he wrote about Christian, Hindu,
and Buddhist practices – to his thoughts on laughter, literature, and eroticism understood in
relation to this experience.

Today I’d like to restrict my comments to considering the experience itself and recounting
something of the itinerary of that experience in Bataille’s writing and life. The focus here will
be less theoretical than biographical or, rather, will be on those moments when
autobiography and theory intersect.
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What’s in a name? Writing ecstasies

Is the experience of the sacred what Bataille means by the phrase inner experience? Bataille
claims it is. In Inner Experience, he makes a distinction between Hegel’s philosophy of work
and the – in his words – “[a] philosophy of the sacred,” which part two of his book “’torture’
expresses.” (84)

Nevertheless, the question remains difficult to answer. What is the experience of the sacred?

Bataille’s friend and collaborator, Roger Caillois, began his book Man and the Sacred, by
saying: “Basically, with regard to the sacred in general, the only thing that can be validly
asserted is … that it is opposed to the profane. As soon as one attempts to specify the nature
and conditions of this opposition, one comes up against serious obstacles. Elementary as it
may be, no formula is applicable to the labyrinthian complexity of the facts.” (13)

In response to that complexity, Caillois proceeds to offer a compelling sketch of what he calls
the “syntax” of the sacred, a sketch of the grammar, rhetoric, or structure of the experience of
the sacred across cultures and periods. Mircea Eliade, among many others, pursued a lifetime
of similar work across similar terrain.

Bataille, on the other hand, proceeds differently. His focus, particularly in the texts of the
Summa, is on the intimate psychological details of the experience of the sacred. If Caillois
offers a description of the grammar of the sacred, Bataille attempts to understand it as an act
of speech, something that is lived.

In Bataille’s work, and not just within the books of the Summa, the experience of the sacred
goes by many names. Inner experience is perhaps the best known of these. But Bataille also
speaks of this experience with many other words and phrases: sovereignty, negative inner
experience, torture, impalement, and the privileged instant, among many others. And he
frequently and explicitly changes his terms.

On Nietzsche: “I no longer want to speak of inner (or mystical) experience but of impalement.
You might similarly say Zen. I find it joyful to give a specific kind of experience a name—as
one does with flowers.” (71)

Method of Meditation § 19: “Previously, I designated the sovereign operation under the names
of inner experience and the extremity of the possible. Now I also designate it under the name of
meditation. Changing the word signifies the problem of using whatever word it might be … I
like meditation better but it has a pious appearance.” (Inner Experience 194)
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To repeat: “Changing the word signifies the problem of using whatever word it might be.”

In Inner Experience, Bataille is even more explicit: the word “God: [a] final word meaning
that every word, later on, will fail.” (42)

Attempting to define the experience of the sacred, the extremity of the possible, inner
experience is itself part of the problem. Yet doing so, attempting to write about or describe
these experiences helps reveal the structure of that problem, as it were, from the inside.

In what I think are some of his most compelling works, Bataille writes less to offer a
satisfyingly complete and accurate representation of the experience in question than to evoke
the problem of that experience by means of writing. The writing performs what it purports.
It demonstrates its failings. On this point, in Inner Experience, Bataille claims he wants to
“shatter discourse” within himself. (64)

This is not only a problem of writing. It is a problem of discipline or field of knowledge. Just
as inner experience cannot be adequately contained within any one word or phrase, it cannot
be circumscribed by any discipline or field of knowledge.

In Inner Experience, Bataille is emphatic on this point: “Inner experience cannot have its
principle in a dogma (a moral attitude), in a science (knowledge cannot be either its goal or
its origin), or in a search for enriching states (the aesthetic, experimental attitude), it cannot
have any other concern or other goal than itself.” (13)

Here again Bataille’s remarks on the difference between religion and inner experience are
relevant. Religions – and the discourses that they embody – “constitute constructions of
answers, constructions at the heart of which the interrogation continues.” (Guilty 220)

As noted above, Bataille’s own interrogation, his search – indeed, and as he says in an article
entitled “The Sacred”: “The great ‘quest’ of what has been given the poor name ‘modern spirit
[modern mind]’” – his quest carried him across many disciplines of knowledge and aesthetic
forms: as noted, novels and poetry, criticism, anthropology, political economy, philosophy,
theology, cosmology. His work pushed these disciplines and the discourses that define them,
to their breaking points, to the point of collapse. In each case, he asks what can this form
accomplish, what can it do, what can it say, and, by pushing the discourse to its limits, he
reveals, as Foucault observed, that which has not been said. (OC 1: 5)
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In Bataille, and particularly in the texts of the Summa, philosophy and theology collapse into
aphoristic autobiography, which in turn dissolves in poetic and literary effects, images and
metaphors, many of which Bataille borrows from classic works of philosophy and theology,
from Nietzsche, Blake, and St. John of the Cross among others. And the circuit begins again.
He writes in a hall of fun-house mirrors in which the notion of realism, as he says, is a
mistake, in which, again as he says, the discursive real has disappeared.

Unsurprisingly, the challenges posed by Bataille’s poly-vocality – by his own most

multifarious art of style – are particularly acute in the passages of his works devoted to the
experience of inner experience. The stylistic gestures and effects he developed in the
apparently autobiographical notebooks that became Guilty would later be harnessed to the
apparently fictional texts of The Impossible, texts which he, at one point, considered part of
the Summa.

In the method of meditation Bataille outlines in Inner Experience, this practice of literary
mimicry is grafted onto the model of dramatic meditation developed by Ignatius of Loyola as
a form of Christian spiritual exercise. The dramatic element is the mimicry itself. The subject
animates a given position or discourse from within, challenging it through experience and
imagination to the point where it gives way, where the referential status of the words and
ideas falters or fails. What results is a specific type of experience that, at its limits, is inner
experience, the experience of the sacred.

My point here today is not to thoroughly examine this method of meditation but rather to
focus attention on some of the passages wherein Bataille recounts its results.

The written record of Bataille’s ecstasies, or at least his reports of those experiences, precedes
the publication of Inner Experience by more than twenty years. That record is to be found in
his letters.

Bataille was raised without religion: his father irreligious, his mother indifferent (Louis XXX,
39). Just prior to the beginning of World War One, however, while still an adolescent, as his
father sank ever deeper into mental debility brought on by syphilis, Bataille found himself
drawn toward a fervent Catholicism through a new friend from school. He had lived most of
his life up to that point in the cathedral town of Reims in the Champagne region of North-
Eastern France, not far from the German border, which is to say, on what was to be the front
line of the coming war. In that cataclysmic atmosphere, he took the sacrament in August
1914, just as the war began.
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During this period, Bataille longed to experience an authentic and indisputable call to
religious vocation. He imagined for himself the life of a monk. In January 1918, he wrote to a
friend, “There is in me a bliss that surpasses me and shatters me – and it is joyously that I am
ready to sacrifice everything to God.” (Lettres 10) He devoted himself to Catholic study but
the call to vocation did not come.

Later that year, in June 1918, Bataille spent a week in La Barde, a Jesuit monastery in the
Dordogne. He reported to his friend: “I lived five hurried, overheated, violent days at La
Barde: I left with the conviction that there is no vocation for me and [yet] with real peace.”
(Lettres 19)

These statements are at least partly ambiguous, if not equivocal: on the one hand, joyous
shattering bliss, violent days; on the other, no vocation and real peace.

Bataille’s Catholicism became less fervent, though he did continue to consider pursuing a
religious life. He visited the Benedictine enclave in exile at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight
in 1920, for example, but, despite the beauty of the scene, still did not take up the cloth.
Rather the opposite, in at least one account he claims to have lost his faith soon after that
visit, when, as he put it, his Catholicism “caused a woman he has loved to shed tears.”
(“Autobiographical Note,” OC VII: 459)

A few years later, still in the early 1920s, Bataille won a scholarship to spend a year in Spain
doing the equivalent of post-graduate research. The Spain he encountered was a place of
“violence and sumptuousness” as he put it in a letter to his cousin, Marie-Louise. While there
he witnessed the death of Granero in the bullring and began to write, in his letters, explicitly
of his sexual desires, he also began writing a novel, and, more significantly for our purposes,
conceived of what he called a “method” by which he could provoke waking dreams and
reveries at will. (Lettres 26-7)

This method of provoking waking dreams and reveries should, I think, be considered a
precursor to Bataille’s later and more concerted method of meditation. Significantly, Bataille
developed this method at a moment of ambivalence or equivocation in his faith. The fulcrum
or pivot point of this equivocation took the form of laughter.
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Laughter

Bataille’s visit to Quarr Abbey in 1920 actually occurred as a stop on a research trip to
London. While there, Bataille chanced to meet the famous French philosopher, Henri
Bergson. In preparation for the meeting, he quickly read Bergson’s shortest book, Le Rire
(Laughter), only to find the book, and shortly thereafter the man, disappointing. Whereas
Bergson accounted for the phenomenon of laughter as a kind of comforting comedy,
Bataille’s own experience of laughter demonstrated a sweeping and convulsive liberation.
Though Bataille was in fundamental and violent disagreement with Bergson’s position, the
book made manifest the possibility of taking things like laughter seriously, indeed of utmost
seriousness.

Thirty years later, in 1953, Bataille remembered that moment: “From that moment on, in my
mind, laughter, no longer being limited to Bergson’s seedy comedy, was tantamount to God
on the level of lived experience … my entire thought resolved itself in this immense hilarity
(this would be incomplete if I didn’t add that this experience of laughter and the experience
of pleasant sensuality found themselves intermingled).” (Unfinished System of Nonknowledge,
154)

To repeat: “laughter was tantamount to God on the level of lived experience.”

Laughter was a “lived experience” and an experience intermingled with “pleasant sensuality”.

Even more explicitly in the lecture for which these notes were written, Bataille linked the
problem of laughter with the fundamental problems of philosophy: “It seemed that to resolve
the problem of laughter and to resolve the philosophical problem were evidently the same
thing. The object that I grasped while laughing, if you will, seemed to me of comparable
interest to the object that philosophy poses to itself most of the time.” (Unfinished System…
140)

Laughter, then, and for Bataille, revealed itself as a theological problem, a philosophical
problem, and a problem intermingled with sensuality, which is to say with the lived
experience of the human body. But it also revealed itself as a problem that could not be
resolved from within those disciplines. His experience of laughter shattered the sense of the
world, the meaning of things, sweeping away the discursive supports of the great works of
philosophy and religion. If the answers proposed by these revered fields where laughable,
what then?
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In the early 1920s, Bataille lacked if not the courage then at least the language of his
convictions. It would take him years, in some ways, decades, to find it. And there were many
false steps. Even his communal projects of the late 1930s, Acéphale and the Collège de
Sociologie dissolved in such confusion that Bataille could write, in Inner Experience: “The war
put an end to my ‘activity’ and my life became all the less separated from the object of its
search.” (95)

This was the point at which Bataille began writing the private notebooks that would later be
edited into the published text of Guilty. Two years later he set them aside to write the central
portion of Inner Experience, “torture.”

The Experience of inner experience

The first text in which Bataille presented his experience of ecstatic rapture to the broad
public was this one:

Inner Experience: “Fifteen years ago (perhaps a little more), I returned from I don’t know
where, late at night. The rue de Rennes was deserted. Coming from Saint-Germain, I crossed
the rue du Four (the post office side). I held in my hand an open umbrella and I believe it
wasn’t raining. (But I hadn’t been drinking: I say it, I’m sure.) I had this umbrella open
without needing it (if not for what I will speak about later). I was very young then, chaotic
and full of empty drunkenness: a round of indecent, dizzying ideas, but already full of
anxieties, rigor, and crucifying; running their course . . . In this shipwreck of reason, anguish,
solitary degradation, baseness, worthlessness came due: a little later the festivity started
again. What is certain is that this ease, simultaneously a collision with the ‘impossible,’ burst
in my head. A space constellated with laughter opened its dark abyss before me. Crossing the
rue du Four, I became in this unknown ‘nothingness,’ suddenly . . . I negated these gray walls
that enclosed me, I rushed into a kind of rapture. I laughed divinely: the umbrella came down
on my head covering me (I covered myself expressly with this black shroud). I laughed as
perhaps no one had ever laughed, the final depth of each thing [le fin fond de chaque chose]
opened, laid bare, as if I were dead.
“I don’t know if I stopped, in the middle of the street, masking my delirium under an
umbrella. Perhaps I jumped (no doubt it’s illusory): I was convulsively illuminated, I laughed,
I imagine, while running.” (40)

Aside from laughter, Bataille’s later rapturous experiences derived from both eroticism and
his various modes of meditative practice, some dating back to the early 1920s, others more
recent, 1938 seems to have been the decisive year.
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In November 1939, in the notes to Guilty (188); included in The Tomb of Louis XXX:
“One of my first ‘meditations’ – at the moment of torpor and the first images: suddenly, I felt
myself become an erect penis, with an undeniable intensity (the previous day, in the same
way, without having intended anything, in darkness, I changed into a tree: my arms were
erected around me as branches). The idea that my very body and my head was no more than
a monstrous penis, naked and filled with blood, seemed so absurd to me that I could not fail
to laugh. Then I thought that so tense an erection could only end in an ejaculation: so
comical a situation became strictly speaking intolerable. Besides, I could not laugh, so
strongly tensed was my body. Like a torture victim, I had to have my eyes turned up and my
head thrown back. In this state, the cruel representation of the torture victim, of the ecstatic
gaze, of the bloody bare flanks, gave me a lacerating convulsion: a spurt of light crossed
through my head from bottom to top as voluptuously as the passage of semen through a
penis. […]

The published text of Guilty picks up here:

“I walked for an hour then I hid in a dark path, wanting to free myself from a nagging
sexual obsession. Then at a certain point, I imagined it essential to shatter beatitude within
me. I evoked the image of a ‘bird of prey eating a smaller bird’. In the night I imagined the
high branches and the black foliage of the trees animated against me, against beatitude, with
the rage of a bird of prey. It seemed like the dark bird descended on me … and opened my
throat.
“This illusion of the senses was less convincing than others. I shook myself out of it
and I think I started to laugh, liberated by an excess of horror and uncertainty. In complete
darkness, everything was clear. On the way back, in spite of an extreme state of fatigue, I
walked across rough stones that normally would have twisted my feet, as if I was a light
shadow. At that moment, I wasn’t looking for anything, but the sky opened. I saw, I saw that
which only an expressly wished for weightiness can prevent one from seeing. The lost
agitation of a suffocating day having finally shattered, volatilized the shell.

“
I kept walking, the black sky brightened before me at every instant. Lightning
emanated from a distant storm ceaselessly, flickering, silent, immense. Suddenly, the dark
silhouettes of trees stood out in bright light. But the sky’s festival paled in comparison to the
dawn that rose. Not exactly within me. I cannot effectively locate something that is no more
graspable nor less abrupt than the wind.
“I was surrounded by the dawn, I was certain, and having little consciousness
remaining, I was lost in this dawn. The violence is soft, the sharpest razor nicked in
comparison with this dawn. A useless beatitude, unintended, blade tightly gripped in a naked
hand, spurting joy.” (Guilty, 33-4)
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Face-to-face with the unintelligible

On several occasions Bataille describes an ecstatic moment as a moment of encounter with

the unintelligible.

Guilty: “As simply as I can, I ask those who see my life as a sickness that only God can cure to
quiet themselves a moment, and, if they then encounter a true silence, not to fear turning
back. Because they have not seen what they are talking about. Whereas I have seen this
unintelligibility face-to-face: at that moment, I was set fire by a love so great that I can
imagine none greater. I lived slowly, happily, I could not stop laughing: I am not charged
with a burden, with the exhausting servitude that began the moment that they started talking
about a God. This world of the living is set before the lacerating vision of the unintelligible
(penetrated, transfigured by death, but glorious), at the same time the perspective ordered by
theology offers itself to this unintelligibility as a seduction. If someone perceives his
abandonment, his disarmed vanity enters an absence of solution and the shallow solution to
the enigma that he is; nothing remains of him but a wound.” (12)

Inner Experience: “God speaks to me, the idiot, mouth to mouth: a voice like fire comes from
the darkness and speaks—cold flame, burning sadness—to . . . the man with the umbrella.
When I weaken, God responds to supplication (How? At whom should I laugh in my room?.
. . ) Myself, I am standing, on diverse summits, so sadly ascended, my different nights of
terror collide, they multiply, stand beside themselves, and these summits, these nights . . .
unspeakable joy! . . . I stop myself. I am? A cry—overcome, I collapse.” (41-42)

On Nietzsche: “The moment came when my audacity—or if you will my nonchalance—

asked me: ‘Couldn’t you yourself have this senseless experience—then laugh about it?’ I
answered: ‘Impossible: I don’t have the faith!’ In the silence in which I was in a truly mad state
of availability, I remained perched over the void, everything appeared equally laughable to
me, hideous, possible . . . At that moment I passed beyond. Suddenly I recognized God.”
“That which an infinite laughter provoked could not be any less comforting.
“I threw myself at the feet of the old ghost.
“We ordinarily have a poor idea of His majesty: I had a revelation of it without
measure.
‘The darkness became an infinite black beard, coming out of the depths of the earth
and the hideousness of blood.” (65-6)
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NOT GOD

More frequently though, Bataille is insistent that the word God, even the notion of God, is
only a placeholder beyond which there is nothing.

The Little One: “In place of God… there is the impossible and not God.” (Louis XXX, 24)

More forcefully still, Bataille’s experience of the sacred is predicated on the death of god, on
surpassing the cognitive limit provided by the concept of God. Bataille’s atheism is not a
rational atheism built on arguments against faith in the supernatural. It is a “Christian”
atheism of someone who strives to complete the crucifixion, who throws himself on the
throat of his god; less a loss of faith than the murder of god. The stable concept of God must
be sacrificed in the experience of the sacred.

Writing in the context of Acéphale: “We cannot envision the Crucified with the cold irony
or the kindliness of men of reason: we cannot remain as indifferent to an agony, still less
experience any fear whatsoever. We can rejoice in the torture: it can become for us an object
of laughter.” (L’Apprenti sorcier, 393)

The experience of the sacred is the experience of an “indeterminable object” (Visions of Excess
240), the experience of the indeterminable itself, of non-differentiation.

In the privileged instant, the border between subject and object, self and world momentarily
dissolves. Bataille sometimes describes this as a moment of “fusion” between self and world,
like gears interlocking and turning together. The term fusion is misleading to the extent that
it suggests the persistence of both self and world somehow fused together. Bataille’s
experience however suggests a rupture in the fabric of the self and a simultaneous rupture in
the fabric of the world. The process is not one in which something – the world – is added to
the subject. Something is in fact taken away from it, the illusion of belongingness, of
participation. This is an experience of self-loss, of an alignment of the self, through loss, with
the unfolding of the universe itself as a passage of energy, a process of entropy.

Inner experience locates life at the level of the universe, as the measure of the universe, not as
a whole nor as a particular part but rather as a passage, a relationship of energies in
circulation. In inner experience life is an outpouring in no way distinct from an influx. This
dual quality of the experience aligns it with a tragic sense of life.
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Beyond laceration

By the time Bataille was writing On Nietzsche, in 1944, his ecstatic experiences had shifted in
tone and temper.

On Nietzsche: “I wasn’t at all aware of the theopathic nature of the mystic states known to
Proust when, in 1942, I attempted to elucidate their essence (Inner Experience). At that
moment, I myself had only attained states of laceration. I only slipped into theopathy
recently: at once I thought of the simplicity of this new state known to Zen, Proust, and, in
the final phase, Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross.” (141)

On Nietzsche: “In the state of immanence—or theopathy—the fall into nothingness is not
necessary. The mind itself is entirely penetrated by nothingness, is equal to nothingness (the
sense is equal to the nonsense). The object meanwhile is dissolved in its equivalence with the
mind. Time absorbs everything. Transcendence no longer grows at the expense of, over and
above, nothingness, abhorring it.” (142)

“The term privileged instant is the only one that, with a certain amount of accuracy, accounts
for what can be encountered at random in the search; the opposite of a substance that
withstands the test of time, it is something that flees as soon as it is seen and cannot be
grasped.” (VE 241) [the “search” here is the quest for the sacred]
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Conclusions?

What can we say of these passages in the end? Can we take Bataille at his word?

The record holds numerous instances of individuals reporting Bataille’s sincerity of tone in
conversation. Hearing him speak was of galvanizing influence, even for some listeners
skeptical about the veracity of his writing (see the “Discussion on Sin” in The Unfinished
System).

Yet the writing teeters on the edge of bathos. Bataille’s tropes and metaphors in these
passages are at once profoundly specific (an open umbrella on a rainless night?) and all but
utterly derivative. His “dark night” is surely borrowed from St. John of the Cross. His “dawn”
is surely Nietzsche’s. The torture victim can be seen in the photographs of the Leng Tch’e
reproduced by Bataille in The Tears of Eros as well as of Christ crucified.

Nevertheless, setting aside both the biographical details and the derivation of this words and
images, we can extract from these passages something like a model of ecstatic experience, a
description of the experience of the sacred, as it is lived by a human body.

Once again, I am not suggesting that Bataille saw “god.” He is explicit as to the fact that he
did not. Rather, he experienced an altered state of experience, a peak experience, which might
be available to most of us under specific circumstances. Admitting, exploring, and grappling
with the implications and meanings of these experiences constitutes his contribution to our
culture.

It is probably important to insist that these are not everyday experiences: sacred, not profane.
Considering them in this way encourages caution, care. These are dangerous experiences
before which we should be humble, respectful. The experience of self-loss described by
Bataille does not resolve itself in a rediscovery or renewal. The subject is not satisfied by these
experiences or completed by them. Rather, these experiences reveal the lack, the insufficiency
that names human experience itself as a question without an answer. We never cross the
frontier of the limit we encounter in these experiences.

On another note, Bataille carries this experience through at the level of the text itself as an
enactment of dramatic mimicry. The writing itself is performative: it leans over the edge of
the abyss when not in fact falling over into it. The hall of mirrors effect in Bataille’s writing
offers readers a mise-en-abyme that textually reflects the displacement of representation and
meaning described in the texts themselves.
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In the model of experience elaborated here, the subject is recognized to be no longer
meaningfully distinct from objects, indeed from the diverse plethora of objects, the whole of
the immanent continuum, which surrounds it, yet simultaneously not to be seamlessly part of
that continuum either.

Bataille’s thought here is ecological. In this connection, I am reminded of what Gregory

Bateson, the English anthropologist, psychiatrist, and cyberneticist, said about the
importance of elaborating and living this kind of experience for the continued success of our
species on this planet.

“The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that
I don’t know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a
reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think ‘Gregory
Bateson’ is cutting down a tree. I am cutting down a tree. ‘Myself’ is to me still an excessively
concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling ‘mind.’ The step to
realizing – to making habitual – the other way of thinking – so that one naturally thinks that
way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree – that step is not an easy
one.” (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 468)

In my reading, Bataille’s project particularly in the texts of the Summa is just such a project: it
records his own efforts to make this kind of ecological thought and experience habitual in his
own life.