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There’s only one principle that binds together Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera — it is that violence is the precondition for thought and that one is not able, through thinking, to analyse the violence that has been wrought to give one the current state of being.   That awareness has to come from outside of one’s thinking processes.  Bataille views initiatory experience as consequent from a mode of violence that puts us “beside ourselves”.

The principle that violence limits consciousness, simultaneously as it creates the capacity for consciousness at all, is the paradox of knowledge that Nietzsche and Marechera’s thought also brings to the fore.

Now, obviously, it has taken me a long time to articulate this, but all the same that is part of the problem with working within the mode of consciousness — and, indeed, within my own personal consciousness which has been particularly limited by violence.

The consciousness restricting and consciousness permitting nature of violence is the key focus that has to be maintained to read these authors deeply and effectively.   Unless one allows them to work their own brand of violence on you, one only derives from them what one already knows.   The violence simply has to come from the outside.

But that is hard to articulate in any polite way.  The reader has to be receptive and open himself up.   Otherwise, one is left with academia, or mere philosophy, and the like.