Inner Experience

SUNY Series: Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

by Georges Bataille, Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (Translator, introduction)

His is a journey marked by the questioning of experience itself, until what is reached is sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a Presence in no way distinct from Absence, where "The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist."

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Religion, Psychology, France, French Literature

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're not familiar with how Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx are connected and how the ideological hegemony of the bourgeois era needs to be transcended before one can fully grasp the freedom of individual sovereignty and make the social revolution, you may not have a clue about what Bataille is working towards with INNER EXPERIENCE. My suggestion is to get a shaman to help you navigate a heavy psychedelic experience AFTER reading and fully grasping Marx's VALUE, PRICE AND PROFIT, Hegel's Introduction to THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA. Otherwise, you can take my shortcut: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNnkyt...

Always keep in mind that Bataille was familiar with the Surrealist treatment and use of Freud's psychological insights and that he was living in Paris during heyday of the Popular Front, Stalinist domination of the ideological left.

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and difficult text. The moments of lucidity in his otherwise dark and obscure prose are jaw-dropping.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

'When I solicit gently, in the very heart of anguish, a strange absurdity, an eye opens itself at the summit, in the middle of my skull.
This eye which, to contemplate the sun, face to face in its nudity, opens up to it in all its glory, does not arise from my reason: it is a cry which escapes me. For at the moment when the lightning stroke blinds me, I am the flash of a broken life, and this life—anguish and vertigo—opening itself up to an infinite void, is ruptured and spends itself all at once in this void.

The earth bristles with plants, which a continuous movement carries from day to day to the celestial void, and its innumerable surfaces reflect the entirety of men laughing or rent apart back to the brilliant immensity of space. In this free movement, independent of all consciousness, the elevated bodies strain towards an absence of limits which stops one's breath; but although the agitation and inner hilarity are lost unceasingly in a sky as beautiful, but no less illusory than death, my eyes continue to subjegate me through a commonplace link to the things which surround me, in the middle of which my steps forward are limited by the habitual necessities of life.'

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find that inner experience is a movement toward not a singular experience, but a communal experience situated beyond discourse and any intellectual project. Bataille is one of the 20th century's most thought provoking thinkers and "Inner Experience" is perhaps one of the most important writings from the interwar period of Europe, being published in 1943. By and large, "Inner Experience" is a poetic meditation dealing with individual insufficiency. Impotent and stupid humanity is always trying to possess & to know, to understand and scientificly, establish a methodology of understanding; but, then of course everything is subsequently categorized. Through inner experience the individual eventually is effaced and becomes part of the unfolding of time: being is remaining the self in the ocean of life. I feel that when reading this book the words tend to dissolve and so does the notion of the "I." I liked it, probably should read the rest of Summa Atheologica and then write another review.

[Zane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is borderline incomprehensible, but reading it itself is a profound experience.

[Arturo · Rating 5 out of 5]

«[...] I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: “I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep.”»

[Joe]

Comment:

History is little more than the myriad activities of religions, empires and states that are ultimately built on channeling / cannibalizing / controlling human interiority. Bataille doesn't want to control inner experience, he wants to set it free.
No one, not even Bataille, knows exactly what that means.

[Bernardo Moreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

O primeiro livro de Bataille que li foi O erotismo. A obra é realmente brilhante, impecável. Por isso, comprei a Suma Ateológica, para entrar mais à fundo na obra de Bataille.
A experiência interior é o primeiro livro da Suma, escrito em 1943, ou seja, 14 anos antes da publicação d'O erotismo. No Postscriptum (1953), Bataille já fala sobre algumas mudanças que seu pensamento passou nesse período de 10 anos.
Diferente d'O erotismo, A experiência interior é carregada de um estilo embriagado e desesperado, deprimido e em revolta. Beirando a literatura, aqui não se encontra a mesma análise sistemática d'O erotismo: a busca aqui é pelas alusões ao não-saber, a recusa à submissão do pensamento. É um processo magnífico. A experiência da leitura consegue aproximar o leitor do êxtase que Bataille se refere: é propriamente meditação. A experiência da angústia e do riso, narradas por Bataille, são especialmente vívidas. Não se trata de um frio tratado de filosofia pura, mas uma virulenta meditação em busca da experiência do impossível.
Confesso que o estilo d'O erotismo me agrada mais: ainda não se trata de um tratado de filosofia pura, mas o esforço de uma "voz firme" é a real força de Bataille. Ainda assim, o "balbucio" d'A experiência interior é um êxtase divino, nos extremos da angústia e do riso.

[Ryan Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A ferocious book, at times I felt my mind and thoughts being torn apart, crushed, and then remolded into a comparable being. The act of the final fall into the void of impossibility and the complete immolation of self towards the ungraspable element of chance and sovereignty only fleetingly acknowledged and grasped, and through this arrives the possibility of communication between free spirits and the power of connection within the void of chance and moments of sovereignty. Through anguish, death, laughter, eroticism, human beings grasp movements of energetic expulsion within cosmic uncertainty after Nietzsche’s radical exclamation of the death of god, and through this uncertainty we may escape from the shroud of utilitarian and servile thought to enter into a realm of connection through sovereign expenditure and poetic efflusion of nonknowledge and incomprehensibility. One of the greatest elucidations of the labyrinth within the soul, one of the greatest books I’ve ever read

[Artur · Rating 4 out of 5]

The flesh of words, bleeding in the sweat of the night, where, at the furthest point, speech no longer flows and returns to sovereign silence. It is an impossible book, to which one can respond only with shameless laughter.

[Gastjäle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whatever theories were held forth in this book are muddy and do not bear repetition, at least by someone like me. They are tensions, a series of alternating moments of resignation and defiance, a true "dance about architecture", as Zappa would have it. Naturally, the content of this book can be laid out and discussed, but it would feel like a cruel affront to Bataille and his supposed aims, at least if such discussion was without the fierce burning of the heart and the uncontrollable feel to expand as a being, through however thorny nebulae.

This is a maddening work that makes you question all the movements inside me. I fell prey to it and I didn't even dare to explain some of the things to myself, in case I might have simply assigned a description on my experience and thus consigned it into the discursive realm. It's not exactly a work that will easily walk beside oneself for years on end, but it was utterly irresistible in the moment I was reading it.

The presence of Bataille was palpable and so full that that alone would have made this work a crowning achievement. But Bataille also offers a gateway into the unknown (which, incidentally, is what he called knowledge). And he shows that there is conviction and courage in someone to approach that unknown - unknown qua unknown, a [] without mental commentary or dramatis personae. He will not do it out of provocation or pettiness, but in the throes of a thrusting, compulsive movement that propels him onwards like a laughing Nietzsche.

Of course, I'm not completely gullible or charmed by Bataille. I do not understand his adamant insistence on anxiety and suffering as the necessary forms of the inner experience, nor do I underwrite an innate desire to be everyone. Yet I do understand the principle of insufficiency, or rather I can feel it, and I am in complete agreement in that the fullness of experience is to be sought after... But in communion, perforce; why, that's occult...

...!

Yet again I've read something I've hoarded a million impressions about yet haven't managed to grasp anything with clarity and composition. But reading Bataille has almost convinced me that this is hardly a deficiency—there is no necessity to bask in the vast plaza of clarity, not when the inner experience is at issue. I am in no way obligated to renounce my reading or my manner of reading as obscure or denigrate myself as a restive flipflopper of a reader. If I did so, I would be setting myself in the common furrows of my mental commentary and continue to sow the same seeds, hating the worker, blaming the tools and anathematising the climate. However, there are times when one needn't sow at all.

[Esteban Galarza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno de los libros más arduos que leí en mucho tiempo y el primer tomo de un proyecto de tres tomos muy ambicioso: la Suma Ateológica de Georges Bataille, una de las mentes más complejas e interesantes que dio Francia el siglo pasado..
En este primero tomo, el que corresponde a La experiencia interior, Bataille busca describir el misticismo quitando la idea de Dios como fin último de trascendencia. Para decirlo burdamente: si hay algún dios implicado en el éxtasis, es una experiencia mística; y si no hay divinidad, ese éxtasis recibe la nomenclatura de experiencia interior. Bataille busca salir de sí y dar cuenta de lo que implica esa desnudez y al mismo tiempo traza las vías que considera necesarias para llegar a ese éxtasis (o qué elementos estuvieron implicados en esa experiencia: la poesía, la risa, la tragedia, la angustia. El salirse de si mismo y vivir soberanamente en la risa, en la poesía, en la tragedia y en la angustia es acercarse un poco más a la idea de Nietzsche de vivir a conciencia como deicidas, la gran broma del siglo de asumirnos como inventores de esa trascendencia y dejar de poner excusas y volvernos soberanos de nuestros propios actos.
Es un texto árido y por momento fragmentario. Me costó especialmente su lectura cuando Bataille utiliza el método que descubre en sí mismo.
De todos modos a tanta aridez el autor me regaló pasajes poéticos de lo más bello que leí con lo que compensa. Tomaré aire y en unos días me adentraré en la lectura del segundo tomo: El culpable/ El Aleluya.

[Alyosha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This writing is the echoes of a cry. A cry of anguish, of the human that is bound and binding in its humanity, its thought, its knowledge. It cries out from the depths of itself, from out of alterity - the cry to the other to sacrifice themselves as well, and so communicate some difference, something subversive that discourse cannot convey. The passion over the guilt of humanity, the oppression that we are, and that empties us. An exigency for sacrifice rends us from within, and we cannot but cry out in anguish. Such, perhaps, is what the inner experience calls one to.
Ecce homo.

[Zack2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard somewhere that after reading The Gay Science, Bataille felt at a loss. How could he write anything that Nietzsche had not already written? I often feel that way reading Bataille himself.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous. Visceral. Vertiginous. This book is a beautiful encapsulation of many of Bataille's themes explored in other texts. The book is fragmentary, but the moments of clarity are brilliant and striking and give a wonderful sense of Bataille thought. However, fundamentally, the book is best read as an experience rather than a collection of propositions.

[Griffin Duffey]

a very wild book that i feel very divided about. i'm totally here for the embracing nonsense, non-knowledge as a legitimate category, mysticism, death of god, the references, worthwhile critiques of hegel, possession, salvation as subterfuge, yada yada. all very important stuff to tarry with. i found this useful for doing so, and is resonate with me. the writing at times was really good, though often still not cutting through to me stylistically (bataille is, without a doubt, reaching for a style.) my main beef is his antagonization of 'projects' and his thin layer of solipsism that's shot through inner experience. my wittgensteinian/foucauldian senses start tingling (lately i've been critical of interiority and existing on strata and experimentation feels opposed to what's going on here) nonetheless, i feel bataille deeply on a lotta this stuff!

"Anguish is the fear of losing, the expression of the desire for possession. It is a stop before the communication that excites the desire but that causes fear. Given a change in the need to possess, anguish, suddenly, turns into ecstasy." (147)

you can't be everything. you will die. dispossess, laugh, and relinquish yourself from torture. i'm open to it.

[Laçin Tutalar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not lucid. But very lucid.
Reminded me of Blue of Noon a lot of times throughout the pages. The two books seemed like a verification of each other.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

"the night is also a sun." (nietzsche)

sometimes in the great darkness of non-knowledge i can feel the tears of infinity rush slice my eyeball in two... an agonizing pain but the affirmation of a violent ecstasy, rupture without resolution, being without representation; the closure of the noumenal gap into the densest core of the self. in an explosive fit of self-sacrifice -- clawing at the walls of an unrecognizable, shattered voice; maternal self-destruction -- the wound reveals an erotic willingness to be fucked by the deep night of the invisible:

"the body sleeps and speech is cut off. and all the signs of friendship, so numerous and indescribable, all the words that god spoke to me, all those that you ever wrote -- i now understand that these were so much less than that which i see with such great darkness, that in no way do i place my hope in them, nor is there any hope in them ... o nihil incognitum!" (st. angela of foligno)

"and so, through this void, it was sight and the object of sight that mingled together. not only did this eye that saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. it saw as object that which prevented it from seeing. its own glance entered into it as an image, just when this glance seemed the death of all image." (blanchot)

"in the halo of death, and there only, the self founds its empires; there the purity of a hopeless demand comes to light; there the hope of the self-that-dies is realized (vertiginous hope, burning with fever, where the limit of the dream is pushed back)." (g. b.)

"the domination of activity is that of the possible, that of a sad void, a decay in the sphere of objects. to subordinate ourselves to the POSSIBLE is to let ourselves banish stars, winds, volcanoes from the sovereign world. god subordinates himself to the POSSIBLE, diverts chance, abandons the choice to exceed limits ... a bond of aimmanence demands a laceration preliminary to the transcendent realm of the activity: such as stripping bare, childbirth, putting to death...(on the level of the comic, a joke reveals the impossible at the heart of the possible.)" (")

"when i laugh or when i have an orgasm the impossible is before me. i am happy but each this is impossible." (")

"(the child but without god, without father, alone in the world. laughing?) (a subway car, that and not hegel decides madness. hegel is only an accentuated form of it.)" (")

"yes, i live, i pursue a light dream. // but my inner clairvoyance? eyes apparently charged with sleep, discreet and smiling, imperceptible, it will never cease to keep watch." (")

this is the most important thing i have ever read.

"................................................this, nevertheless, is the instant...................................this, presently, neither my absence nor me, neither death nor light -- and my absence and me, death and light -- a light laugh rises in me like the sea, it fills the absence immensely. all that is -- IS TOO MUCH." (")

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a veritable prayer book, at times brilliant (like the night--the eye of a human being that becomes awful), at times frustrating guide to supplication in the profound absence of God.
What it addresses is nothing less than the all too familiar feeling of insufficiency rousing in the dregs of our being, the impossible drive to BECOME EVERYTHING, to occupy the summit of BEING, while at the same time retaining our discontinuity, our autonomy.
Hence we are each condemned to suffer as a particle of anguish suspended in the void.
There is no solution, no salvation, except maybe in communicating our contagion to others in an exercise of negative atheology.
Thus Bataille urges us to invest in EXPERIENCE and EXPERIENCE alone, to kneel before its sole authority and value, to recognize its sovereignty (suspending scientific, philosophical, religious and even mystical sufficiencies, everything that reeks of what he condescendingly labels as "project"- a postponement, life put off until later), and offer ourselves up to the UNKNOWN which it delivers.
At this point any perceptive reader will not be too shocked to learn that scarcely anything positive can be stated about what INNER EXPERIENCE is, lest we succumb to the temptation to put darkness to the service of the light (spiritual desolation revitalizes one's faith, the staple of mysticism, beginning with Dionysus the Areophygite), as non-knowledge merely neutralizes knowledge claim to self sufficiency, it does not subvert, upend or otherwise endeavor to usurp its place.
Nonetheless Bataille assures us that it is distinguished from absolute nothingness by "more than does a world of a thousand colors" (125).
Indeed, "non-knowledge communicates ecstasy", but one has to first crash on the shores of the end of the limit of the possible.
Woe unto all who approach this book expecting to be edified.

[C. · Rating 2 out of 5]

[Edição francesa da coleção TEL Gallimard, 1978].

É realmente impressionante a capacidade de um homem da primeira metade do século XX na casa dos seus 30 anos de soar quase tão edgy quanto um pré-adolescente de 13 anos que escreve letras de Nine Inch Nails no caderno da escola. Apesar disso, eu aprecio por vezes a violência poética de Bataille (v. p. ex. os primeiros parágrafos de "O Azul do Céu")

As conversas sobre os santos católicos, tortura chinesa e êxtase (quase tudo da terceira parte) foram interessantes, mas a nível teórico eu realmente não consigo levar nada aqui muito a sério. Se você tiver qualquer interesse, basta apenas a seção "O Labirinto" e se você se sentir mais afim o resto da terceira parte assim como a quarta parte (até a segunda digressão) podem lhe ser agradáveis.

Como o autor, eu me sinto demasiado tomado por uma angústia sufocante (e por uma enorme dor de cabeça) após encarar esse livro e portanto me sinto forçado a acabar essa resenha por aqui até retornar do meu estado de êxtase e escrever mais meio parágrafo e parar de novo. Eu espero jamais ter que olhar o vazio nesse céu novamente.

E - por Deus! - não se aproxime d'O Suplício.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

In search of a rupture, a cut, a laceration- anguish, torture- ecstasy, laughter- "we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with the ungraspable beyond" (p.18).

The ungraspable beyond- not a transcendent beyond, but the void which is fully within the world. The limits of the possible, the extremity, the edges/peak of inner experience. Not 'salvation' which is "the most odious of subterfuges." This is the rejection of rational unified philosophical projects (epitomized by Hegel). It is rather, "simply to be" (p. 19).

Inner experience, sovereign operation, a method of meditation, the rejection of external means... laughter is a sovereign moment. Sovereignty is a revolt that cannot be acquired, it cannot be fabricated from a servile state (that which uses the world).

"The opened depths of the world does not have a meaning." (p. 189).

Haven't been reading hardly at all in the last few months...which actually feels very Bataille inspired. Nonetheless thankful to have worked through this with my homie Griff. "The project is no longer salvation but of abolishing the power of words, therefore of project"!!

[Patch · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was definitely a fun read, not sure I entirely agree with him though. I remember there was something that irked me, but I didn't have time to write the review till now and forgot whatever it was. Something about how it relates to materialism. I did really like the more artsy poetic writing style, and I thought his take on Nietzsche was interesting. Though there was a lot, like some sections I just felt like I was re-reading Zarathustra. The stuff about language and the dissolution of the subject/object was also cool.

[cds · Rating 5 out of 5]

dense, often agonizing text that essentially tries to describe the indescribable…
this
itself
was an experience
bataille, as always, took me to the edge of the cliff, glad to be sick so I could have this company……

hegel but (non — savoir)
heidegger but better
marx but ‘general economy’

sovereignty but not the power of a king over subjects; the power of a human to exist in the "now" without being a slave to work, God, or even the future

bataille is — O

[doomsaying]

took me over a year to read….an extremely difficult but rewarding experience. There are some parts of this that I understood intuitively and other parts that went totally over my head. Most of this is fleeting impressions, stream of consciousness, images and feelings which do go along way in describing the transcendental, ecstatic states at the core of this.

[Abdou Ksb · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5
A bit repetitive

[Filipe Siqueira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deus, escute esse homem, por favor, ele clama!!

[Mahmoud Amr · Rating 5 out of 5]

To try to name the unnamable, to communicate the incommunicable, to dwell in the presence of absence, the gaping néant, the dark emptiness of unknowing... That is the question.

[Annepos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emicrania Gnostica

[David Val Campillo]

La seriedad es una servidumbre!!

[clarissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

need to reread this after reading heidegger. incoherent and beautifully written though i suspect that slight incoherence is precisely the aim