#Bataille

[thirdity]

As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were "perfectly natural," quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we "possess" this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves. Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us.

Georges Bataille, "The Cruel Practice of Art"

[mobymartin]

Sylvia Bataille, 1938, wife of Georges Bataille, then mistress and later wife of Jacques Lacan

[website-enjoyer]

—Archangelic, Georges Bataille, trans. Stuart Kendall

[dearorpheus]

to the Bataille girlies of tumblr.com ♡ written by Marguerite Duras and published in La Ciguë in 1958

[dionysian-sadness]

Artwork pulled from the four Acéphale journals

[rendingrocks]

"The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth."

Georges Bataille

[autoeroticalgolania]

Hans Bellmer / Study for Bataille's Story of the Eye

[criminal-delirium]

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. Still, I can’t choose to become an entire human being by simply fighting for freedom, even if the struggle for freedom is an appropriate activity for me—because within me I can’t confuse the state of entirety with my struggle. It’s the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle agains a particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence. Each of learns with bitterness, that to struggle for freedom is first of all to alienate ourselves. 

—Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche.

[trees-waiting]

Georges Bataille, 𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘍𝘪𝘭𝘮

[reterritorialisation]

Blue of Noon, Georges Bataille

[moonbug]

[thirdity]

Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.

Georges Bataille, Guilty

[francepittoresque]

25 novembre 885 : siège de Paris par les Normands ➽ http://bit.ly/Siege-Paris-Normands Après leur défaite par les milices de la Neustrie, en 884, les Normands restèrent pendant une année sans reparaître sur les rives de la Seine. Ils y revinrent en 885, et entrèrent dans le fleuve avec sept cents vaisseaux à voiles, et un nombre d’autres petits navires si considérable qu’ils « couvraient les eaux de la Seine sur un espace d’un peu plus de deux lieues »

[website-enjoyer]

—Archangelic, Georges Bataille, trans. Stuart Kendall

[loneberry]

From Amy Hollywood’s "Beautiful as a Wasp": Angela of Foligno and Georges Bataille

*

Ecstatic darkness in the void. Angela of Foligno is the original badass.

[against-forms-recognizable]

The wealthier society becomes, the more alienated we become from one another, the more offended and fearful we are of one another, the more ashamed we are to actually be ourselves instead of sticking to the sterile platform of civility. The average person's enthusiasm for this hellscape is dystopian.

Skyrocketing rates of depression, loneliness, freefalling rates of relationship formation, dating, sex, and in the middle of this, the mass, delighted at the ability for capitalism to sell them a product like a Ring doorbell to mediate the fear of their fellow human being that capitalism itself produced in them. And for the depression and alienation modernity inculcates? Well, they can sell you therapy. For the loneliness? Look at these dating services, buy a Super Like now! Consume, consume, consume, and they've been trained to love it, to think that this is how it's meant to be.

Life is dirty, impure, offensive, tragic. We have all of these models of what the good, pure, moral person acts like, what the good life looks like - perfect models that do not exist in reality, meaning that other people are always going to be offensive, always going to be irritating, because they are not these ideals but only themselves, which can never embody an ideal.

We start to find being around others distasteful because it produces within us shame at how we are not what we and others demand of us - we are only our unique selves. We hold these ideals in common above ourselves, suppressing any part of us that does not conform to the mandate of the cop in our head that tells us what to do and how to be.

It is here, when we begin to suppress our authentic selves and genuine desires for the sake of what society demands we must be, that we die in life. A life that is not just a continual process of rendering yourself sterile and inoffensive - that is, a thing that is not alive, since life is inherently unclean and wild and 'death' is the process of becoming a thing that is motionless, without ability to give offense, without ability to conflict - requires an embrace of genuine authenticity, of the life that is cheek by jowl with death. The celebration of life as tragedy - of all of the things society tells us our life should not be, that we must avoid, must cleanse ourselves of - this is what it means to truly live.