Contra Wolin

Bataille does not endorse immediate sense certainty. I believe that this is a mistake made by those who imagine that Bataille's agenda must necessarily be a search for "Truth". Such critics retain the old metaphysical category of Truth that Bataille has long dispensed with, when they try to critique Bataille in this way. Bataille's views were very much psychological and his writings show that he understood very much that his approach was historically situated and far from being universal in the sense that Western metaphysics would posit 'universality'. Bataille was a keen student of Hegel and Marx and thus his views were often very much situated in terms of these theoretical postulates, which do not dispense with an understanding of historically contextualised change and transformation. It is actually outrageous even to suggest that Bataille escaped into irrationalism without his understanding, both intellectually and experientially, the nature of bourgeois rationality. If his writings do not indicate that Bataille understood how the system worked, then perhaps Wolin was reading another Bataille, or reading him through the lens of metaphysical binaries, whereby rationality and irrationality are diametrically opposed, rather than being organically linked in every way -- which brings me to my next point. The point in engaging with the negative (which was Bataille's actual project, contrary to Wolin) is that it is a means to understand the nature of bourgeois rationality more thoroughly, given that the irrational and the rational are intricately linked (they are actually both the products of the human mind). They are not to be cordoned off separately as if to embrace rationality was to renounce irrationality, since this would be practically impossible (even if it is theoretically thinkable).

It seems that Wolin mistakes Bataille's project for a metaphysical one, when it was really a psychological one. Thus he condemns Bataille unfairly.