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99a96c2
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I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
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truth
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Georges Bataille |
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6cc6ca8
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Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.
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Georges Bataille |
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40b345b
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Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.
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Georges Bataille |
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49a852a
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In what will survive me
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Georges Bataille |
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747d3d1
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Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).
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Georges Bataille |
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7d2a634
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To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on condition that they be insipid. But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as "pleasures of the flesh" because they really are insipid; I cared onl..
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Georges Bataille |
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72f7f74
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Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror
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Georges Bataille |
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9b689af
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Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.
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solitude
sovereignty
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Georges Bataille |
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d6984bb
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I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.
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servility
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Georges Bataille |
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db625e3
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A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.
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Georges Bataille |
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d4d95d7
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Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic..
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permanence
stability
power
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Georges Bataille |
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6fd2cd5
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The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out. Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.
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Georges Bataille |
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5d6347f
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Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.
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Georges Bataille |
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92a3b3a
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There is always some limit which the individual accepts. He identifies this limit with himself. Horror seizes him at the thought that this limit may cease to be. But we are wrong to take this limit and the individual's acceptance of it seriously. The limit is only there to be overreached. Fear and horror are not the real and final reaction; on the contrary, they are a temptation to overstep the bounds.
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Georges Bataille |
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f890133
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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.
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philosophy
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Georges Bataille |
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61242e7
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You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.
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Georges Bataille |
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f116c42
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I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?
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Georges Bataille |
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cc659ac
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We did not lack modesty--on the contrary--but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.
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Georges Bataille |
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c6dd07c
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The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.
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Georges Bataille |
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6bdef17
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Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.
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Georges Bataille |
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53ce33e
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Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death."
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Georges Bataille |
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a67101e
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Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance.
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Georges Bataille |
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d6177d4
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If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves wit it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.
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sovereignty
rupture
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Georges Bataille |
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bdc7a9c
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The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.
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Georges Bataille |
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66b353f
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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.
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Georges Bataille |
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1dc768c
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That discourse one might call the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don't know.
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Georges Bataille |
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da87581
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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 calcu..
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Georges Bataille |
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ff76e91
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I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our us..
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sex
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Georges Bataille |
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dcc73d5
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I began to willfully indulge in dreams that, with the help of a bottle of wine, became completely mad and were close to being loathsome.
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Georges Bataille |
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89720df
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Let me stress that in this work flights of Christian religious experience and bursts of erotic impulses are seen to be part and parcel of the same movement.
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Georges Bataille |
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2abf62f
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Continuaba cuestionando los limites del mundo, al ver la miseria de quien con ellos se conforma, y no pude soportar por mucho tiempo lo facil de la ficcion: yo le exigia la realidad, me volvi loco. Si mentia, me quedaba en el plano de la poesia, de una superacion verbal del mundo. Si perseveraba en una denigracion ciega del mundo, mi denigracion era falsa (como la superacion). En cierto modo, mi conformidad con el mundo se profundizaba. Per..
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mentiras
realidad
noche
poesía
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Georges Bataille |
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ea8fa07
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To put it more precisely, since language is by definition the expression of civilised man, violence is silent. Civilisation and language grew as though violence was something outside. But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not tim..
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Georges Bataille |
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746b9b2
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Pathetic creatures on their knees... Tirelessly, naively repeating, "Don't take word for it! Alas, we're not all that logical. We say God-though in reality God is a person, a particular individual. We speak to him. We address him by name-he is the God of Abraham and Jacob. We treat him just like anybody else, like a personal being..." "So he's a whore?"
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Georges Bataille |
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5f9af9a
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Deneyin bizi alip goturdugu yere goturmesini istedim.
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Georges Bataille |
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5829015
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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 ..
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Georges Bataille |
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85a0831
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Human life is exhausted from serving as the head of, or the reason for, the universe. To the extent that it becomes this head and this reason, to the extent that it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts servitude. If it is not free, existence becomes empty or neutral, and if it is free, it is in play. The Earth, as long as it only gave rise to cataclysms, trees, and birds, was a free universe; the fascination of freedom was tarnishe..
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Georges Bataille |
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9c55544
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La poesia no es un conocimiento de si, y menos aun la experiencia de un lejano posible (de lo que anteriormente no existia) sino la simple evocacion con palabras de posibilidades inaccesibles.
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experiencia
palabras
poesía
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Georges Bataille |
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716f1a2
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Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one's breath away. Only the extremism of desire and death enable one to attain the truth.
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Georges Bataille |
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faddf6e
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And, writing to you, I know that I cannot speak to you, but there is no way of preventing myself from speaking. I am going abroad, as far away as possible, but everywhere I go I shall be in the same delirium, the same whether far from you or near, for the pleasure in me depends on no one, it emanates from me alone, from the imbalance in me which perpetually frays my nerves. You can see it for yourself, you aren't the cause of it, I can do w..
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Georges Bataille |
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16cdb28
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We pedaled rapidly, without laughing or speaking, peculiarly satisfied with our mutual presence, akin to one another in the common isolation of lewdness, weariness, and absurdity.
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companionship
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Georges Bataille |
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93899e7
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When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.
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Georges Bataille |
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981258c
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Human life, distinct from juridical existence, existing as it does on a globe isolated in celestial space, from night to day and from one country to another--human life cannot in any way be limited to the closed systems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions. The immense travail of recklessness, discharge, and upheaval that constitutes life could be expressed by stating that life starts with the deficit of these systems; at least what it ..
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Georges Bataille |
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b8b9333
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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 real..
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Georges Bataille |
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ac41b71
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Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere.
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Georges Bataille |