Georges Bataille Quotes on Knowledge
Georges Bataille pursued a paradoxical philosophy in which the limits of knowledge matter more than its achievements, and the quotes gathered here, drawn largely from Inner Experience, express that pursuit. For Bataille, what we cannot grasp is the point of greatest importance, and genuine experience is reached precisely by what he calls a contestation of knowledge, a deliberate undoing of the mind's drive to define and master its object. He describes remaining in an intolerable non-knowledge whose only outcome is ecstasy itself, a state that discursive reason cannot capture without destroying it. This restless attention to the sacred, to expenditure, and to the edges of comprehension placed Bataille at the margins of surrealism and philosophy, and made him an important influence on later French thought.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Georges Bataille:
“What we cannot grasp is the point of greatest importance.”
-
“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 disadva”
The Bataille Reader (1997), p. 340 -
“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.”
Wikiquote -
“I can grovel at His feet if I believe He doesn’t exist.”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
Wikiquote -
“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 -
“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.”
L’Expérience Intérieure(1943) | p. xxxiii -
“We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.”
L’Expérience Intérieure(1943) | p. 12 -
“I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.”
L’Expérience Intérieure(1943) | p. 12 -
“[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.”
On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxxii