The corrective to flatness and vacuity

The corrective to Nietzsche‘s self-sacrifice via elitism or “transcendence” is of course Georges Bataille, who is clearly of the left and addresses the problems of modernity as a closer contemporary to you or I.

The problem of bourgeois society IS the reification of the ego — that is, the assumption that a concept of oneself defines one’s actual identity I think that liberals in general cannot understand a critique from someone of my bent, who takes up the Nietzschean tradition. They imagine that it would be impossible not to reify the ego or to avoid doing so would mean to denigrate (perhaps even to disintegrate) the ego. This is typical bourgeois black or white thinking.

One cannot develop actual subjectivity unless one sacrifices the aggrandizement of the bourgeois ego.  Yet the (only apparent rather than actual) sacrifice does not lead to nothing or negation, although that is the danger and the threat that Bataille’s writing announces.