Saturday, 2 November 2013

"Nothing"

When Bataille speaks of the dialectic as producing "nothing" or a negation, he does not mean eliminating everything.  Rather he means making room for everything.

One must eliminate the internalized patterns of language and grammar to make room for reality.  Otherwise, one will continue to speak and think and act in distortive terms about what is.

To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect – more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a “subject,” can it appear otherwise.
GENEALOGY OF MORALS, FIRST ESSAY #1 

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Cultural barriers to objectivity