Georges Bataille quotes

Georges Bataille was a French intellectual, writer, and philosopher known for his explorations of taboo subjects and transgression. His works often delved into mysticism, eroticism, and the limits of human experience. He remains influential in literature, philosophy, and cultural theory. Here are 82 of his quotes:

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them. (Georges Bataille)
Entirety exists within me as exuberance in empty longing in the desire to burn with desire. View quote
Georges Bataille
What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which generally isn't true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being. View quote
Georges Bataille
Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God's person displaces the problem and does not abolish it. View quote
Georges Bataille
By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical. View quote
Georges Bataille
The difficulty that contestation must be done in the name of an authority is resolved this: I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is. View quote
Georges Bataille
Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends. View quote
Georges Bataille
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction. View quote
Georges Bataille
Life is whole only when it isn't subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom. View quote
Georges Bataille
We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it. View quote
Georges Bataille
The total person is first disclosed ... in areas of life that are lived frivolously. (Georges Bataille)
[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with. View quote
Georges Bataille
If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me. View quote
Georges Bataille
Philosophy finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean. View quote
Georges Bataille
I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself. View quote
Georges Bataille
Humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed in humanity-as-entirety. View quote
Georges Bataille
An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being. View quote
Georges Bataille
The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge. View quote
Georges Bataille
Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning-and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action. View quote
Georges Bataille
To choose evil is to choose freedom-"freedom, emancipation from all restraint.”. View quote
Georges Bataille
The preceding criticism ... justifies the following definition of the entire human: human existence as the life of "unmotivated” celebration, celebration in all meaning of the word: laughter, dancing, orgy, the rejection of subordination, and sacrifice that scornfully puts aside any consideration of ends, property, and morality. (Georges Bataille)
It is through an "intimate cessation of all intellectual operations” that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency. ... The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, ... what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind. View quote
Georges Bataille
Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. ... It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate. View quote
Georges Bataille
In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn't develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote "with his blood,” and criticizing, or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one's lifeblood. ... It was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned. View quote
Georges Bataille
The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out. View quote
Georges Bataille