Bataille, Lacan nexus

The narcissus post below is interesting, because Mike and I are both reading Bataille together, this time his book, Inner Experience.  Of course Bataille and Lacan lived in the same milieu, even to the point that Lacan later married Bataille's ex-wife.   I have heard it said that Lacan derived a lot of his understanding of the mind from Bataille.

Of course, it seems that Lacan and Bataille put their ideas to very different uses. What Lacan sees as the path to normal psychological development, or its binary antagonist, pathological stasis or deviation, Bataille views in terms of an inclination of the psyche to invoke a sense of the sacred.

In terms of Bataille's theory, we start out in life with a primeval sense of the sacred, but then we encounter our limits.   I think Bataille finds it very interesting to play off our sense of the infinite ('wanting to be everything') against our limits.   This creates an internal or "subjective" dialectic, which Bataille equates with mysticism, albeit in the absence of any God.

I refer to this paragraph from the link, in particular:

>>>>You cause him to be tested: this is the kind of person you are, you are good at this but not that. This other person is better than you at this, but not better than you at that.  These are the limits by which you are defined.   Narcissus was never allowed to meet real danger, glory, struggle, honor, success, failure; only artificial versions manipulated by his parents.   He was never allowed to ask, "am I a coward?  Am I a fool?"  To ensure his boring longevity his parents wouldn't have wanted a definite answer in either direction.  http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/the_story_of_narcissus.html

Now, I think the difference between Bataille's paradigm and that of Lacan is that Bataille requires that one should constantly test one's limits, especially in terms of confronting real danger.   However, unlike Lacan, he does not think that discoveries based on one's real life success or failures should eternally define one.   To assume so would be to erect a monotheistic deity above you, who beckons you upwards with the seduction that there are some fixed and transcendent moral lessons to be learned, and that one's experiences are a means to learn these.   This expectation imposes a danger of a metaphysical reading of existence -- when, in reality, there is no overarching moral order, and the lessons that life teaches you are not fixed, or absolute.   Indeed, whilst experiences may be indicative of one's limits, and surely are indicative of one's physical, intellectual and emotional nature, they do not serve to teach us any moral lessons about anything, apart from those that we would wish to apply as personal principles, out of our own desire to be a particular kind of person or thing.   We have to educate ourselves, in other words, and that it the meaning of confronting real dangers:  in order to work out what we choose to make of them.

The difference between Lacan and Bataille, then, should be plain:   Lacan outlines that we should leave the realm of primeval relationships to learning and on the basis of accepting one's limitations, one should climb the monotheistic ladder toward moral perfection.   Bataille says:  since there is no God, that is just a metaphysical conceit that, moreover, robs you of fruitful exploration of one's limits in relation to one's will to power (that is, one's "desire to be everything").

You can also see that Lacan's notion of the psyche involves linear progress, whereas that of Bataille involves a dialectic with no end point in sight.