Despair is not a motif of theology, but a lacuna within i...

Despair is not a motif of theology, but a lacuna within it. It is neither disbelief, or doubt, but an unknowing so radical that it both escapes the scope of any possible epistemology and lacks all doctrinal intelligibility. Despair cannot be defined as a claim, a hesitation, denial, or uncertainty. It is an abandonment, and a plea without conceivable destination; a desertification resulting from the catastrophic disappearance of the value of being. Despair is not humble, but hubristic, and it is not pious in the least, but tragic. [...]

If life were a discourse death could wait, but dreams break down, there is repetition. Bataille’s text does not anticipate death; it fractures seismically under the impact of oblivion. Each of its waves are broken recollections of the taste of death. Each beginning again – as such and irrespective of its inherent signification – moves under the influence of an unanticipated dying. Waves have no memory. They reach afresh each time to the deep ebb that undoes them in darkness, beating to a pulse that eludes them. The absent shingle-hiss of death is discursively manipulated into textual regularity, but this does not erase the multiple beginnings again; marking the contour of each retraction into silence. [...]

Techniques of disintegration operate at all levels of Bataille’s text, tending to distribute it along an axis of maximal fission. The extreme instance of this is the anorexic attenuation typical of his poetry, where the line is stripped of almost all its semantic and syntactic burden to enter into a vertical series of discontinuous cries. The line collapses towards a resilient spinal core, along which shrunken stanzas unstring themselves, like beads dropping from a broken necklace into a dimension of intoxicating descent. Other techniques include extended ellipsis, the employment of two separate hears of paragraphing with both indentations and vertical line-breaks), violent narrative shifts of a various kinds.... But in the end it is not a matter of technique. The fragmentation of Bataille’s text cannot be domesticated within the subjective genitive. Death ‘itself’ dissipates, aborts, fragments. Stories forestall completion, organisation is lost, draft is spliced corrosively with acomplishment. [...]

A delirial fracturing presses the dominant thematic flows to the point of narrative discontinuity; shattering the aspiration to literary accomplishment, and collapsing its remains in amongst the embers of characters who cannot complete themselves. A sterilizing malaise dithers between narrative content and the process of writing. Sketches, fragments, ruptures, suicides, drunks, impossible desire and the burning thirst to be damned ...this is a world of wrecked art, nihilistic love, and death triumphant; pervaded throughout by a hideous allure.

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annhilation