Literature and Evil Quotes

“Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“The road to the kingdom of childhood, governed by ingenuousness and innocence, is thus regained in the horror of atonement. The purity of love is regained in its intimate truth which, as I said, is that of death. Death and the instant of divine intoxication merge when they both oppose those intentions of Good which are based on rational calculation. And death indicates the instant which, in so far as it is instantaneous, renounces the calculated quest for survival. The instant of the new individual being depended on the death of other beings. Had they not died there would have been no room for new ones. Reproduction and death condition the immortal renewal of life; they condition the instant which is always new. That is why we can only have a tragic view of the enchantment of life, but that is also why tragedy is the symbol of enchantment.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law - without which the law would have no end - independently of the necessity to create order.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Boredom seeps from the monstrosity of Sade’s work, but it is this very boredom which constitutes its significance. As the Christian Klossowski says, his endless novels are more like prayer books than books of entertainment. The accomplished technique behind them is that of the ‘monk … who sets his soul in prayer before the divine mystery’. One must read them as they were written, with the intention of fathoming a mystery which is no less profound, nor perhaps less ‘divine’, than that of theology.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Charles Baudelaire’s refusal was the most profound form of refusal, for it was in no way the assertion of an opposite principle. It only expressed that which was indefensible and impossible in the poet’s obstructed state of mind.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law –without which the law would have no end –independently of the necessity to create order. Literature cannot assume the task of regulating collective necessity. It should not conclude that ‘what I have said commits us to a fundamental respect for the laws of the city’ or, like Christianity, that ‘what I have said (the tragedy of the Gospel) shows us the path of Good’ (which is really the path of reason). Literature, like the infringement of moral laws, is dangerous.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“La poesía, en un primer impulso, destruye los objetos que aprehende, los restituye, mediante esa destrucción, a la inasible fluidez de la existencia del poeta, y a ese precio espera encontrar la identidad del mundo y del hombre. Pero al mismo tiempo que realiza un desasimiento, intenta asir (captar) ese desasimiento. Y lo único que le es dado hacer es sustituir el desasimiento a las cosas asidas (captadas) de la vida reducida: no puede evitar que el desasimiento pase a ocupar el lugar de las cosas.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Assim, a via de criação de um elemento soberano (ou sagrado) — de um personagem institucional ou de uma vítima oferecida à consumação — é uma negação de um desses interditos cuja observação geral faz de nós seres humanos em vez de animais. Isso quer dizer que a soberania, na medida em que a humanidade se esforça em direção a ela, exige que nos situemos "acima da essência" que a constitui. Isso quer dizer também que a comunicação só pode ocorrer sob uma condição: que recorramos ao Mal, ou seja, à violação do interdito.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“To no mortal love does this apply as much as to the union between the heroes of Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Nobody revealed this truth more forcefully than Emily Brontë. It is not that she envisaged it in the explicit and cumbersome terms in which I have interpreted it: she felt it and expressed it mortally, almost divinely.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“The passion for truth and justice often gives those who experience it a start. Those who experience it? But surely to desire truth and justice is the same thing as to be a man, to be human. However unequally distributed such a passion may be, it marks the extent to which each man is human – to which human dignity is due to him. Marcel Proust wrote in Jean Santeuil: It is always with a joyful and positive emotion that we hear those bold statements made by men of science who, for a mere question of professional honour, come to tell the truth – a truth which only interests them because it is true, and which they have to cherish in their art without hesitating to displease those who see it in a very different light and who regard it as part of a mass of considerations which interest them very little.1 The style and the content of this passage are very different from A la Recherche du temps perdu. Yet, in the same book, the style changes, but not the thought: What moves us so much in Phaedo is that, as we follow Socrates’ arguments, we suddenly have the extraordinary feeling that we are listening to an argument whose purity is unaltered by any personal desire. We feel as if truth were superior to everything, because we realise that the conclusion that Socrates is going to draw is that he must die.2 Marcel Proust wrote about the Dreyfus case around 1900. His dreyfusard sympathies are known to us all, but after A la Recherche du temps perdu, written ten years later, he lost his ingenuous aggressiveness. We ourselves have also lost that simplicity. The same passion may occasionally arouse us, but, on the whole, we are too tired, too indifferent. A Dreyfus case in our day would probably cause little stir …”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Blake managed, in phrases of a peremptory simplicity, to reduce humanity to poetry and poetry to Evil.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“She had the sort of knowledge which links love not only with clarity, but also with violence and death – because death seems to be the truth of love, just as love is the truth of death.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Before the necessity of action, we are overwhelmed by Kafka’s honesty, which abrogates no rights for itself. Whatever the lesson contained in Genet’s books, Sartre’s defence is inadmissible. Literature had to plead guilty.1”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“For him, literature was what the promised land was for Moses. ‘The fact that he was not to see the Promised Land until just before his death is incredible,’ Kafka wrote about Moses in his diary. ‘The sole significance of this last view is to show how imperfect an instant human life is – imperfect, because this aspect of life (the expectation of the Promised Land) could last indefinitely without ever appearing to be more than an instant. Moses did not fail to reach Canaan because his life was too short, but because his was a human life.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Those imaginary flames contribute to the understanding of his books. They are books doomed to the flames: they are there, but they are there in order to disappear, as though they have already been annihilated.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Soon after the War a Communist weekly paper, Action, opened an inquiry into an unexpected subject. Should Kafka be burnt? the editors asked. The question was all the more incongruous since it was not preceded by anything which might have led into it: should books be burnt? Or, what sort of book should be burnt? However that may be, the editors’ choice was subtle. The author of The Trial is, as they say, ‘one of the greatest geniuses of our time’. Nevertheless the large number of replies proved that boldness paid. Besides, even before it had been formulated, the inquiry had received an answer which the editors omitted to publish – Kafka’s own answer.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Though Blake was a visionary he never gave a real value to his visions. He was not mad: he simply saw them as human, the creations of the human mind.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“If Wordsworth and Coleridge appreciated him, it was not without reservations. Coleridge, at least, complained of the indecency of his writings. He had, on the whole, to be set aside, to be kept in the background.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“The morning she died, after a brief lung disease, she got up at the usual time, joined her family without uttering a word and expired before midday, without even going back to bed. She had not wanted to see a doctor.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Emily Brontë, of all women, seems to have been the object of a privileged curse. Her short life was only moderately unhappy. Yet, keeping her moral purity intact, she had a profound experience of the abyss of Evil.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Literature is not innocent. It is guilty and should admit itself so. Action alone has its rights, its prerogatives. I wanted to prove that literature is a return to childhood.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Turmoil is fundamental to my entire study; it is the very essence of my book.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil