The Bataille Reader Quotes

“Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.”
― Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader

“The certainty of incoherence in reading, the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books. Since appearance constitutes a limit, what truly exists is a dissolution into common opacity rather than a development of lucid thinking. The apparent unchangingness of books is deceptive: each book is also the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions.”
― Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader

“My stupidity gave its blessing to succouring nature, on her knees before God.
What I am (my drunken laughter and happiness) is nonetheless at stake, handed over to chance, thrown out into the night, chased away like a dog.
The wind of truth responded like a slap to piety’s extended cheek.
The heart is human to the extent that it rebels (this means: to be a man is ‘not to bow down before the law’).
A poet doesn’t justify — he doesn’t accept — nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.
When to accept poetry changes it into its opposite (it becomes the mediator of an acceptance!) I hold back the leap in which I would exceed the universe, I justify the given world, I content myself with it”
― Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader