Bataille's system

Bataille‘s system may be misleading.

I understand that it is likely to come across as glib:  It seems like one might be asserting that its easy or indeed fine to deny the absolute nature of truth, enjoy indolent revelry and go home free.

That is, I am sure, how it seems from the opposing point of view, which is the mainstream one.   Yet  perhaps the fact that people do not actually permit themselves to behave in the ways described above should be indicative that this is not what we should understand by his writings.

One does not deny the truth without a cost.  Unless one is truly disoriented in relation to reality, one always has an inner compass pointing one in the direction of conformity.   Only, sometimes conformity looks like chaos and sometimes it is really what it seems to be: superficial, glib liberalism, where truth is agreed upon and everybody acquiesces to the range of ideas considered permissible.   If one has to ask for permission and obtain it tacitly, one can behave in indolent fashion to one’s heart’s content, but one is not really participating in a dynamic that would produce inner experience.

To put it in a different way, a lack of knowledge and experience within the structural dynamics of the psyche is often telling at the level of interpretation.   For instance, much of what I say with regard to my endeavors could be interpreted as a resignation or a devolution into sentimentality.   Those who interpret things in this way take their own experiences as the blueprint for evaluating others’ experiences.   But this map is wrong because it covers too small an area of the psyche.   There are areas that reach beyond the raptures of capitulation or the descent into a focus on feeling sensations.   This may sound arrogant to assert that one’s map extends beyond those of many others, but this is just a map — and not one’s human nature.   One has the same being as everybody else, only the map of the potential reaches for the human psyche is broader.

The proof of a variance is made clear in the fact that one leans on the notions one feels one is sure about.  One uses them as support and thereby implicitly depends on them not to let one down when one is in the midst of leaning on another in a conversation.   This is the normal manner of conversing — to feel each other out in darkness.   But some reach out to control — to take hold of the other person under the shade of nightfall.   And generally they will presume upon the solidity of common tropes, that expressions of dismay imply defeat or that ideas are best served with a measure of paternalistic reassurance.   Thus they show the limits of their mapping.

The discrepancy, as I have stated, relates to maps and not to being itself.   I, with my limited being, am restricted in just the same way as any other,  but am on a different part of the map, from where I often seem to be — an outcome of initiatory experience and transgression.

It means I can be perfectly open and attempting no defence, and others will still read me as being somewhere other than where I am.   I cannot be grasped at.

This means that more is going on, within Bataille’s system, than a disappearance into indolence.   In fact there has been tremendous pain involved in extending the map.

One simply isn’t where one used to be anymore, and this is a sign of far more than a different plotting on the usual map.