Georges Bataille Quotes on Death
Georges Bataille’s Inner Experience (1943), Erotism (1957), and the posthumous Theory of Religion give twentieth-century French philosophy its most uncompromising treatment of death as the inner limit of conscious experience and the horizon against which the human animal’s distinctive forms of life take shape. The central claim is that the human world is constituted by the prohibition against death and violence that founds the realm of work and reason, and that the transgressive eruptions of eroticism, sacrifice, ritual, mysticism, and excess are the necessary returns of the sovereign moment in which the limits of the discontinuous individual are momentarily breached. The framework, drawing on Mauss’s anthropology of the gift, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, and Nietzsche’s affirmation of life’s terrors, shaped the subsequent work of Klossowski, Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, and the broader French engagement with the limits of philosophy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Georges Bataille:
“Sovereignty is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would impose.”
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Attributed to Georges Bataille:
“Eroticism is the assenting to life up to the point of death.”
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“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.”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
Erotism: Death and Sensuality(1962) | p. 107 -
“There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.”
Erotism: Death and Sensuality(1962) | The Marquis de Sade , cited by Bataille in Erotism: Death and Sensuality -
“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.”
Blue of the Noon(1935)