What scares the new atheists | John Gray | World news | The Guardian
One point of disagreement is that Bataille is not postmodernist, if you read his writings. He doesn't go in for postmodernist cultural relativism at all, but rather, like Nietzsche, is an atheist absolutist. Postmodernism mixed Christian values, such as forebearance, an associaton of passivity with goodness, and above all the notion of human proneness to criminal error (in faith-based language, 'original sin') with Nietzschean philosophical skepticism. This contradictory mix is emblematic of a transitional stage in history, away from domination by Christian dogma toward something as yet not defined, but perhaps more Nietzschean in texture. By contrast, Bataille was attempting something completely different, which was to use Christian ideology as a slingshot into an atheistic future. To be clear, he didn't mingle the two perspectives but tried to use one to propel the other.
Another issue which seeks clarification from the article is that Nietzsche's famous illiberalism may not have been so much a political preference, but one to do with psychological honesty and being true to oneself rather than gravitating toward a muddied middle ground. His provocation is to live and die by your own values, not in a mindset of fuzzy accommodation of values that nobody really has much confidence in, but which appear safe.
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