worth repeating

Bataille gets his lessons from language and the danger of too much consciousness from Nietzsche.

The shaman sees both sides of the psychological coin -- the advantages pertaining to the early world of paranoid-schizoid consciousness, and those that pertain to the adult state of rationality.  

Bataille’s approach, like all shamanistic approaches, seeks to draw dialectic of communication between the two.

 In the paranoid-schizoid state, there are only singularities, with nothing else sufficiently resembling each event enough to acquire the label of being “the same”. It is with this awareness in mind that Bataille rails against the limitations of the “I” that is adopted when we take up language.

The logic of language, which is the inductive method of knowing, makes him seem (to himself) to be one out of all too many human entities who have been linguistically reduced to conceptually simplified forms, rather than the singularity that he knows he is. He finds this “I” to be servile and lacking in the sovereignty that comes from being a singularity — a thoroughly individual self.


Bataille, however, is also keen to use language (the other way of formulating reality) effectively, to convey, if possible, this sense of lack he feels in having to imply that his identity is general and universalisable.


He also expects to fail in his attempt to bridge the two worlds that divide our self-identity, to the degree that we, as readers, lack the capacity to take in a point of view that does not depend on language.


Marechera's Black Sunlight maintains knowledge of the two different modes of being, building a bridge between the paranoid-schizoid position and language.


Thus  Black Sunlight   expresses a shamanistic position that sees reality as having two very different sides to it.